Undersea Global Strike Joe Buff Military.com March 13, 2006 The Pentagon has expressed the compelling need for one or more systems that achieve precision non-nuclear strike missions promptly against "time urgent targets" globally. Here precision means hitting the target with GPS-guided (or equivalent) accuracy, say a maximum miss of ten yards. Prompt means an extremely rapid cycle from receipt of intel on a target's location to munitions arriving to obliterate said target. ("Prompt" has been formally defined as one hour, so in this context it requires a weapon flight time of barely thirty minutes, even less.) Global means exactly that: the capacity to "reach out and touch someone" -- or some thing -- anywhere on Planet Earth. For America's Submarine Force, both transformational working concepts and innovative deployed capabilities have been multiplying in recent years at a breathtaking pace. Some projects now in the pipeline -- which I'll cover in my next essay -- include firing supersonic Sidewinder anti-aircraft/anti-ship missiles from a submerged SSN's existing Tomahawk Vertical Launch System tubes, shooting clutches of conventional theater ballistic missiles out of one of a converted SSGN's (ex-SSBN's) former Trident sub-launched nuclear ballistic missile (SLBM) tubes, and launching and retrieving unmanned aerial vehicles (some armed) through the SSGN's "repurposed" seven foot inner diameter tubes. Today's discussion will focus on another timely yet controversial notion: rearming some of the latest Trident II D5 missiles with high-explosive warheads and deploying them in a few tubes on Ohio-class SSBNs -- which would continue to serve primarily in their thermonuclear deterrent roles. An idea will be offered below which might, after further study, fix the biggest problems with fielding non-nuclear ("conventionally") armed Tridents on an SSBN thus tasked to perform such new double duty. But first, why does this subject even come up, and just what are these problems as noted by critics? The Pentagon has expressed the compelling need for one or more systems that achieve precision non-nuclear strike missions promptly against "time urgent targets" globally. Here precision means hitting the target with GPS-guided (or equivalent) accuracy, say a maximum miss of ten yards. Prompt means an extremely rapid cycle from receipt of intel on a target's location to munitions arriving to obliterate said target. ("Prompt" has been formally defined as one hour, so in this context it requires a weapon flight time of barely thirty minutes, even less.) Global means exactly that: the capacity to "reach out and touch someone" -- or some thing -- anywhere on Planet Earth. Achieving this Prompt Global Strike in practice is a rather tall order. But it's absolutely necessary, to meet the expanding medley of threats America faces today and tomorrow. For one example, suppose Osama Bin Laden is spotted getting a bit of fresh air outside a cave redoubt in the eastern Afghanistan mountains. He's vulnerable, but not for very long. As another illustration, imagine a ballistic missile is spotted on a North Korean launch pad, busy being fueled before launch -- and the DPRK just fired one high-explosive missile at Japan. This second missile might carry an A-bomb. American and allied forces are exhausted and out of position due to a month-long combined exercise in southern WESTPAC -- so what do you do? Or posit that an advanced diesel sub is sitting at a pier in Iran, about to unload nuclear weapon technology smuggled by the Russia mafia via a covert rendezvous with a "neutral" merchant ship in the Gulf of Oman. That surfaced, stationary sub is a target of opportunity that, in some imaginable scenarios, we'd very much want the option to blast to pieces, before its nefarious cargo could be dispersed and trucked to Iran's hardened underground bunkers. Every minute would count. Now comes the issue of implementing Prompt Global Strike truly promptly. This isn't as easy as it sounds. A Tactical Tomahawk cruise missile is subsonic, flying as fast as a 747, and to reach its maximum range of about 1,500 nautical miles will take more than two hours -- too long. Bombers and fighter-bombers, whether land or sea based, even if supersonic, can take just as long or much longer to penetrate to their objective, even when using stand-off weapons. Prompt Global Strike thus calls for a different approach, one based on intercontinental-range ballistic missiles. Depending on their programmed flight path, these reach speeds approaching Mach 16. Two competing solutions are being bandied about in the Pentagon, one from the Air Force and one from the Navy. What makes the debate complex is the big fundamental risk behind Prompt Global Strike, whatever form(s) the hardware takes and regardless of which armed forces branch or branches "own" it: An intercontinental-range ballistic missile launched by America against a deserving third party could be mistaken by Russia or China as the start of a nuclear strike against them, inviting immediate retaliation by ballistic missiles armed with H-bombs. When individual warheads have yields of hundreds of kilotons, and one modern ICBM or SLBM can carry several independently targeted warheads (MIRVs), it pays to not take any chances. Both the Air Force and the Navy, no slouches, have offered solutions to this potentially fatal drawback of Prompt Global Strike. The Air Force suggests building some new ICBM silos on America's coasts, well away from the nuclear ICBM silos in the Midwest, to reduce ambiguity of intent. The hope is that anyone likely to panic and try to nuke us due to a Prompt Global Strike attack will "realize" that these coastal launch points indicate a conventional warhead is bound for some terrorist or rogue state. This idea, unfortunately, is dependent on Russia and China having precise launch-detection sensors and flawless, utterly rigorous command-and-control -- dangerous assumptions. Open inspection of the conventionally armed coastal ICBMs, and advance notice via Hot Lines to Moscow and Beijing when a Prompt Global Strike against some bad actor is slated to occur, sound great but might not make adequate allowance for Murphy's Law. And Murphy's Law rules when the ICBM trajectories would probably pass over Russia or China or both before hitting their targets. The Navy's suggestion is to include some Trident II D5s armed with non-nuclear warheads on SSBNs when they go on patrol. This provides our Commander in Chief with the option to use a strategic deterrent nuclear sub for a second purpose: to launch a conventional Prompt Global Strike from a stealthy platform hiding underwater. There are considerable challenges with this approach, however. Reconfiguring an SSBN to be able to fire two types of missiles -- given the maze of hardware, software, safeguards, and radiation protection already required when some of the warheads are nuclear -- could lead to expense and delay. It also requires the same vessel to have two separate logistics, maintenance, and crew training tracks, further making the arrangement sound like a bundle of nasty headaches. If the SSBN is on station in its assigned alert patrol area near Russia or China, there's the same issue with SLBMs as with ICBMs -- seemingly-nuclear trajectories coming toward countries able to shoot back at America with their own missile nukes. Or, to avoid this geographic conflict, the SSBN could cruise to a better launch point. But that takes considerable time, compromising the "prompt" part. It also takes the whole sub far off station, compromising its nuclear deterrent value, and spoiling its all-important stealth once it launches a single conventional missile. And there's another problem which I think naysayers could never be convinced to ignore: If the same SSBN carries two types of missiles, and a conventional Prompt Global Strike order ever does comes through, what stops a worst-case tragic error where the wrong type of missile gets launched? The mistake doesn't ever have to happen. The mere possibility of it might not go over well in Congressional subcommittee hearings scheduled soon. Plus, Congress has already expressed reluctance over steps that appear to make crossing the threshold to going nuclear any easier or more likely -- a mixed missile load on an SSBN might be seen by some on Capitol Hill as violating that special taboo. Permit me to offer a possible answer to most of the difficulties involved in undersea-based Prompt Global Strike as detailed above: "Repurpose" a small number of in-commission SSBNs to serve entirely as conventionally-armed Trident II launch platforms. For some background, 18 Ohio-class Trident subs were built. The four oldest are almost done being converted to SSGNs, which because of permanent changes to all their launch tubes and other equipment are entirely unable to shoot any Tridents, regardless of the warhead involved. Discussion has been going on gradually for some time of maybe retiring or repurposing up to four more of the Trident subs still in service as SSBNs. The viewpoint supporting such a move is that, in the current and forseeable strategic environment, a fleet of 10 in-commission SSBNs is sufficient for America's needs. (A new design of SSBN to replace the Ohio-class as it ages out is currently planned to enter service around 2030.) If those four additional SSBNs did become available for repurposing, one use suggested for them (other than scrapping the lot, which in my mind would be a terrible waste), is to convert them into more commando-and-Tomahawk SSGN vessels. But in the big picture, maybe the existing four SSGNs are enough, and dedicated Undersea Prompt Global Strike is a viable, maybe essential use for any further redundant SSBNs. Consider the advantages of what purely for talking purposes I'll label an "SSCN" -- an SSBN who's Trident missiles all have conventional (non-nuclear) warheads. With Blue and Gold crews alternating at sea, the SSCNs would achieve the same ultra-high availability as current SSBNs and SSGNs. Logistics, training, and safety issues already mentioned for a mixed missile load are nicely resolved. And best of all, so is the problem of ambiguous missile type and trajectory. Borrowing a good idea from the Air Force, of repositioning the launch points, the SSCNs could be ordered into alert patrol areas that are completely out of range for the Trident II D5 against Russia or China, let alone their warheads not overflying either country. This new type of Prompt Global Strike sub could be kept at the ready in far southern latitudes, an idea already proposed by the Navy but to my knowledge only in the context of what opponents consider overly risky dual-use SSBNs -- whose expensive nuclear Tridents would mostly be of scant utility when positioned down toward Antarctica. To get to this SSCN solution, one needs first to abandon the Cold War-era image of ICBMs flinging back and forth across the North Pole. (But a thorough grounding in Cold War theory on nuclear weapons use remains essential.) In undersea-based Prompt Global Strike against terrorists and rogue states, the North Pole has nothing to do with it. And the South Pole, which gets brought up a lot in this context, has even less to do with it. Data published by the U.S. Naval Institute indicates the maximum range of a Trident II D5 SLBM is 6,000 nautical miles. Much of the trajectory extends through outer space, cleanly resolving the problem of in-atmosphere overflight rights, and the time to target is reportedly only 24 minutes at most -- very prompt. By an extremely useful coincidence, given the size of the earth (about 24,000 miles in circumference), this means that one SSCN can hit anything within a hemisphere centered on the ship's location. This is not an exact statement, because for brevity I'm leaving out complicated issues of orbital mechanics, but it's close enough. Consider that the most likely targets for conventional Prompt Global Strike would be terrorists and rogue states. One SSCN on station in the extreme southern Indian Ocean, far from any shipping lanes (which also solves the problem of launch debris), could hit anywhere in the "terror and piracy belt" extending from North Africa through the Middle East and all the way to the Strait of Malacca and the Indonesian Archipelago. Yet Russia and China would not feel threatened, since if they knew anything at all, they'd know that the missile was coming north from a sub near Antarctica, and it lacked the range to threaten them. All this is because of another useful coincidence: which countries are located where upon our "third rock from the Sun." (I've said this before and I'll say it again, it really does pay to just look at a globe. Maybe watching too many Powerpoint briefings on flat-screen displays makes people think too much in two dimensions?) Don't forget that discussions would be needed with India and Pakistan as well. Although they lack missiles able to reach the U.S. homeland, a Prompt Global Strike launch might be mistaken by each as the start of a nuclear attack by the other, triggering a catastrophic regional A-bomb and H-bomb exchange. But again, the proposed SSCN's SLBM launch point and direction of flight should quickly assuage such fears. Theater ballistic missiles from India and Pakistan aimed at each other would move west-east and vice versa, not northward from thousands of miles away at sea. As an alternative, one SSCN far southeast of New Zealand could, among other things, hold North Korea (but not Russia) at risk, and could just barely threaten a slim slice of coastal China immediately opposite Taiwan. Who could ask for more? Rapid communication of fire-mission orders to the SSCN would not be the problem that some pundits think. No longer part of America's thermonuclear deterrent triad, an SSCN on patrol could afford to expose itself more than an SSBN to stay in perpetual touch with higher command. That exposure would be minimal anyway, since the sub can constantly trail a floating wire antenna just below the surface. This would serve as a "bell ringer," to get detailed orders by quickly coming to periscope depth and raising a low-observable high-baud-rate antenna mast for communications via satellite. No more the excruciatingly slow extremely-low-frequency (ELF) method of talking to boomers down deep. (In fact the U.S. Navy's two huge ELF transmitters, in Michigan, were dismantled as no longer needed, and to save costs.) Since the supply of converted SLBMs is not intended to be large, any one SSCN can deploy with some of its 24 tubes filled with ballast -- and extra non-perishable food? -- and still be very effective. To satisfy applicable arms-control inspection treaties signed with Russia, Moscow's observers could examine the warhead bus of the non-nuclear Trident missiles just before they're loaded into an SSCN outbound on patrol. Ditto for Beijing, if they need reassurance. Conventional Prompt Global Strike is vital to national defense and homeland security. Implementing it is a job that the Silent Service seems uniquely suited to help achieve, and participation by the Air Force as well may offer more fire-mission options, better tactical flexibility, and needed systems redundancy in a transformational non-nuclear dyad.

Hotel U.S.A.- Concentration Camps By Joseph Richey AlterNet March 14, 2006. The government's plans for an 'immigration emergency' include relocation and detention centers -- courtesy of Kellogg, Brown and Root. Some time between now and 2010, the U.S. government expects some uninvited guests -- a massive influx of undocumented immigrants. In preparation for their arrival, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) backed the National Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which mandates 40,000 new beds and barracks for foreign-born refugees at four undisclosed locations over the next five years. On Jan. 3, 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) expanded an existing contract held by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) and renewed it to accommodate up to 20,000 refugees from environmental and political disasters. A future expansion in 2008 calls for another 20,000 beds. Detention of immigrants and other undesirables without charge is nothing new. After the Civil War, many states supplied troops and police to assist private armed guards to arrest and detain striking workers. In 1918, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and a youthful 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover launched raids to round up and deport alleged subversives. In the fall of 1934, striking textile workers were interned in camps at Fort MacPherson outside Atlanta, Ga. Congress approved the Internal Security Act of 1950, including FBI Director Hoover's "Security Portfolio," a plan to arrest and detain up to 20,000 dissidents. 1984 Director of Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) under Ronald Reagan reconstituted a readiness exercise, Operation Night Train, code-named REX 84, a potential roundup of up tens of thousands of Central Americans residing in the United States for internment in ten military detention centers. But the difference here is that the emergency detention and removal plans for 2006-2010 are built on a new contingency support contract. Originally awarded in 1999 by the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, the contract sought logistical support for imagined immigration events. Contingency support contracts are good business for KBR, which provides insurance for calamities that don't happen. When George Bush and Dick Cheney moved to Washington, many Texas-based companies teed up for contract extensions and new business opportunities. Among them, KBR was viewed by many in the defense contracting industry as a capable, fast and far-reaching company. KBR has been awarded the last three expanded improved detention center contracts administered by the Army Corps. The awards often come well in advance of the expiration date. Take the latest detention center contract between DHS/ICE and KBR: The solicitation went to 26 vendors of detention and logistical support services, 11 of them based in Texas. As with most large service contracts entailing indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity and rapid response time, Halliburton's KBR submitted the only bid for the work. While this does not constitute another "cost-plus no-bid contract," which have been cited as particularly vulnerable to abuse and fraud, the contract award to a single bidder doesn't lend itself to much competitive pricing. Contracting officer Linda Eadie of the U.S. Army Corps' Fort Worth, Texas, district, who administrated the DHS/ICE deal with KBR disagreed: "This is a cost-plus contract, but it is not a no-bid. The procurement was competitively negotiated." During the contract negotiations, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. USACE learned the hard way about the limitations of the 2001-2005 contract. The existing contract responded to an "immigration emergency," not a "migration emergency." Hurricane Katrina involved "evacuees" from within the United States, and not "refugees" or immigrants from abroad. Under the contract, no task orders could be issued, with the exception of a requirement to perform readiness exercises on a moment's notice. Under that provision, DHS ordered KBR to provide temporary shelter for DHS and ICE officials in New Orleans for $7 million. In the "recompete" solicitation for the detention and relocation centers, USACE modified the terms. Under the new contract, the detention and relocation centers will be able to hold both immigrant refugees from U.S.-born natural disasters and foreign-born natural disasters. This new program expands the DHS Contingency Support Project and ICE's Detention and Removal Program. In the event of another Katrina-like flood, ICE, with KBR's logistical support, will perform a large-scale migrant catch and release program. DHS and ICE determine what constitutes an immigration emergency. But no one from ICE or DHS has responded to queries about specific scenarios that would order KBR to act on the contract. A KBR press release from Jan. 24 quotes Bruce Stanski, executive vice president, KBR Government and Infrastructure, who "looks forward to supporting the development of new programs." Could an immigration emergency be declared tomorrow in Arizona, Texas or California at the urging of conservative political leaders from those regions? Is this program the foundation of internment camps on U.S. soil again? Evacuee resettlement facilities can be converted into detention centers at-the-quick. An Army Corps procurement analyst told me, "Mobile watchtowers are easily wheeled onto the corners of barbed-wired tent camps." The stated intentions of the contract and acquisition plan do not include those features. Linda Eadie explained that KBR's work could prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the event of natural disasters such as floods, plagues, tidal waves, hurricanes, earthquakes or a political crisis abroad, like "the fall of a current or future government." USACE maintains it's money well spent on a de facto insurance plan against a humanitarian disaster, offering public shelter for evacuees from a variety of storms, natural disasters, human-induced events. Immigration lawyers and migrant advocates warn that the government plans to detain and remove more people, including asylum seekers. Attorney Ahilan Arulanantham with the ACLU of Southern California told AlterNet, "Obviously, if the government's intentions are to care for refugees displaced by a natural disaster, we have no problem with that. But with the numbers of detentions, which have exploded since 1996 and more so after Sept. 11 -- and remember after 9/11, the government detained over 1,000 people in New York City, none of whom were linked to terrorist activity -- based on stories like these, we fear that their program could victimize people fleeing persecution or calamity, the very people that the program is designed to help." The most recent award to KBR announced on Jan. 3, 2006, extends and expands the existing contract, as part of the DHS Contingency Support Project and ICE's Detention and Removal Program. Kellogg, Brown and Root will get $481,212 per year to maintain readiness. "Rapid response capability is expensive," writes Debra Pulling, one of the U.S. Fort Worth district Army Corps contracting officers, in a memorandum. If called into duty, KBR would have access to a maximum amount of $385 million per deployment. Given the increased frequency and intensity of Gulf Coast hurricanes alone, five deployments would cost more than $1.9 billion over five years. Each of the four detention centers would accommodate a single male population consisting of 40 percent of the total detainees, 10 percent single female, 40 percent families with children, and 10 percent criminal and sick. Each location will have three different checkpoints: a temporary staging facility where up to 5,000 can be housed and fed for up to 72 hours, and 1,800 can be processed a day; a transfer point holding up to 600 migrants for up to three months before relocation; and to accommodate longer stays for criminal and sick detainees, a temporary detention center where potential terrorist threats can be processed for "rendition" to a site outside the continental United States. Notable among the specifications for KBR is the Department of Defense security requirement for "secret" classification of assigned personnel. Relating to potential task orders, a Corps memorandum states: "Although this contract will be executed inside the United States, it is likely to be used only during periods of significant political unrest affecting countries near to the United States. Such unrest, quite apart from its impact in creating a large number of refugees, may constitute a serious threat to the United States, which could result in the deployment of military forces. This contract requires an immediate stand up of facilities that will receive a large influx of refugees. It is anticipated that the refugees will not speak the language, and the circumstances may involve a hostile environment within the camp. Consequently, a potential for violence will exist in the camps. While there may or may not be a deployment of U.S. troops, there certainly will be a deployment of border patrol and other law enforcement agents, in a quasi-military manner." The flexibility redrawn into the contract for these relocation and detention centers has alarmed human rights supporters both inside and outside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. [AU: WHY?] One anonymous source within USACE warned, "Don't wait until they're putting people behind barbed wire. Don't wait until the cattle cars pull up. Nip this in the bud." A representative from the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee remarked, "To offer help at gunpoint, where people are not free to accept or reject it, is not really help." An ICE spokesman told the New York Times on Feb. 4, 2006 that if a migration emergency does not happen, the detention centers may never need to be built. In fact, KBR is not planning to build anything. Existing structures, be they a local stadium, warehouse or airplane hangar, will be leased for a given period of time. The prospective demand and requirements for this expanded emergency response activity is in the hands of government agencies. They'll be the ones to decide what constitutes an emergency, be it Category 4 hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, coup d'etats in Haiti, African killer bee-induced evacuations of Northern Mexico or, less dramatically, the mass influx of immigrants that crosses the U.S. border after the Christmas holidays. Whatever the emergency is, and whatever poor folks will be rounded up, one thing is certain: They will not be free to leave, and their hosts for the next five years will be Kellogg, Brown and Root. Joe Richey is a freelance journalist and translator. Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

Flashback: Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs' - Concentration Camps By Nat Parry Consortium News February 23, 2006. Is the Pentagon building U.S.-based prison camps for Muslim immigrants? Evidence points to the possibility. Not that George W. Bush needs much encouragement, but Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a new target for the administration's domestic operations -- Fifth Columnists, supposedly disloyal Americans who sympathize and collaborate with the enemy. "The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements," Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6. "I stand by this president's ability, inherent to being commander in chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don't think you need a warrant to do that," Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat. "Senator," a smiling Gonzales responded, "the president already said we'd be happy to listen to your ideas." In less paranoid times, Graham's comments might be viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to have it both ways -- ingratiating himself to an administration of his own party while seeking some credit from Washington centrists for suggesting Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush runs the War on Terror. But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy. Top U.S. officials have cited the need to challenge news that undercuts Bush's actions as a key front in defeating the terrorists, who are aided by "news informers," in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Detention centers Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with "an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs," KBR said. Later, the New York Times reported that "KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space." Like most news stories on the KBR contract, the Times focused on concerns about Halliburton's reputation for bilking U.S. taxpayers by overcharging for sub-par services. "It's hard to believe that the administration has decided to entrust Halliburton with even more taxpayer dollars," remarked Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Less attention centered on the phrase "rapid development of new programs" and what kind of programs would require a major expansion of detention centers, each capable of holding 5,000 people. Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to elaborate on what these "new programs" might be. Only a few independent journalists, such as Peter Dale Scott and Maureen Farrell, have pursued what the Bush administration might actually be thinking. Scott speculated that the "detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law." He recalled that during the Reagan administration, National Security Council aide Oliver North organized Rex-84 "readiness exercise," which contemplated the Federal Emergency Management Agency rounding up and detaining 400,000 "refugees," in the event of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States. Farrell pointed out that because "another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the centers would be used for post-911-type detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge" of immigrants flooding across the border. Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo." Labor camps There also was another little-noticed item posted at the U.S. Army website, about the Pentagon's Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program "provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations." The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a "rapid action revision" on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a "template for developing agreements" between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations. On its face, the Army's labor program refers to inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The Army also cites various federal laws that govern the use of civilian labor and provide for the establishment of prison camps in the United States, including a federal statute that authorizes the attorney general to "establish, equip, and maintain camps upon sites selected by him" and "make available … the services of United States prisoners" to various government departments, including the Department of Defense. Though the timing of the document's posting -- within the past few weeks -- may just be a coincidence, the reference to a "rapid action revision" and the KBR contract's contemplation of "rapid development of new programs" has raised eyebrows about why this sudden need for urgency. These developments also are drawing more attention now because of earlier Bush administration policies to involve the Pentagon in "counter-terrorism" operations inside the United States. Pentagon surveillance Despite the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibitions against U.S. military personnel engaging in domestic law enforcement, the Pentagon has expanded its operations beyond previous boundaries, such as its role in domestic surveillance activities. The Washington Post has reported that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Defense Department has been creating new agencies that gather and analyze intelligence within the United States. The White House also is moving to expand the power of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created three years ago to consolidate counterintelligence operations. The White House proposal would transform CIFA into an office that has authority to investigate crimes such as treason, terrorist sabotage or economic espionage. The Pentagon also has pushed legislation in Congress that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. But some in the Pentagon don't seem to think that new laws are even necessary. In a 2001 Defense Department memo that surfaced in January 2005, the U.S. Army's top intelligence officer wrote, "Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on [military] intelligence components collecting U.S. person information." Drawing a distinction between "collecting" information and "receiving" information on U.S. citizens, the memo argued that "MI [military intelligence] may receive information from anyone, anytime." This receipt of information presumably would include data from the National Security Agency, which has been engaging in surveillance of U.S. citizens without court-approved warrants in apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. Bush approved the program of warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11. There also may be an even more extensive surveillance program. Former NSA employee Russell D. Tice told a congressional committee on Feb. 14 that such a top-secret surveillance program existed, but he said he couldn't discuss the details without breaking classification laws. Tice added that the "special access" surveillance program may be violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. With this expanded surveillance, the government's list of terrorist suspects is rapidly swelling. The Washington Post reported on Feb. 15 that the National Counterterrorism Center's central repository now holds the names of 325,000 terrorist suspects, a fourfold increase since the fall of 2003. Asked whether the names in the repository were collected through the NSA's domestic surveillance program, an NCTC official told the Post, "Our database includes names of known and suspected international terrorists provided by all intelligence community organizations, including NSA." Homeland defense As the administration scoops up more and more names, members of Congress also have questioned the elasticity of Bush's definitions for words like terrorist "affiliates," used to justify wiretapping Americans allegedly in contact with such people or entities. During the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on the wiretap program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained that the House and Senate Intelligence committees "have not been briefed on the scope and nature of the program." Feinstein added that, therefore, the committees "have not been able to explore what is a link or an affiliate to al-Qaida or what minimization procedures (for purging the names of innocent people) are in place." The combination of the Bush administration's expansive reading of its own power and its insistence on extraordinary secrecy has raised the alarm of civil libertarians when contemplating how far the Pentagon might go in involving itself in domestic matters. A Defense Department document, entitled the "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support," has set out a military strategy against terrorism that envisions an "active, layered defense" both inside and outside U.S. territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to "transform U.S. military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the … U.S. homeland." The Pentagon strategy paper calls for increased military reconnaissance and surveillance to "defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States." The plan "maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us." But there are concerns over how the Pentagon judges "threats" and who falls under the category "those who would harm us." A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity's TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters. In December 2005, NBC News revealed the existence of a secret 400-page Pentagon document listing 1,500 "suspicious incidents" over a 10-month period, including dozens of small antiwar demonstrations that were classified as a "threat." The Defense Department also might be moving toward legitimizing the use of propaganda domestically, as part of its overall war strategy. A secret Pentagon "Information Operations Roadmap," approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for "full spectrum" information operations and notes that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice versa." "PSYOPS messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," the document states. The Pentagon argues, however, that "the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG [U.S. government] intent rather than information dissemination practices." It calls for "boundaries" between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but does not outline any corresponding limits on PSYOP campaigns. Similar to the distinction the Pentagon draws between "collecting" and "receiving" intelligence on U.S. citizens, the Information Operations Roadmap argues that as long as the American public is not intentionally "targeted," any PSYOP propaganda consumed by the American public is acceptable. The Pentagon plan also includes a strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the flow of information, viewing the web as a potential military adversary. The "roadmap" speaks of "fighting the net," and implies that the internet is the equivalent of "an enemy weapons system." In a speech on Feb. 17 to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration's perception that the battle over information would be a crucial front in the War on Terror, or as Rumsfeld calls it, the Long War. "Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place," Rumsfeld said. The Department of Homeland Security also has demonstrated a tendency to deploy military operatives to deal with domestic crises. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the department dispatched "heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for its work in Iraq, (and had them) openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans," reported journalists Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo on Sept. 10, 2005. Noting the reputation of the Blackwater mercenaries as "some of the most feared professional killers in the world," Scahill and Crespo said Blackwater's presence in New Orleans "raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here." U.S. battlefield In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the United States and has been in place since shortly after the 9/11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order No. 1 which empowered him to detain any noncitizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant. "The president decided that he was no longer running the country as a civilian president," wrote civil rights attorney Michael Ratner in the book "Guantanamo: What the World Should Know." "He issued a military order giving himself the power to run the country as a general." For any American citizen suspected of collaborating with terrorists, Bush also revealed what's in store. In May 2002, the FBI arrested U.S. citizen Jose Padilla in Chicago on suspicion that he might be an al-Qaida operative planning an attack. Rather than bring criminal charges, Bush designated Padilla an "enemy combatant" and had him imprisoned indefinitely without benefit of due process. After three years, the administration finally brought charges against Padilla, in order to avoid a Supreme Court showdown the White House might have lost. But since the court was not able to rule on the Padilla case, the administration's arguments have not been formally repudiated. Indeed, despite filing charges against Padilla, the White House still asserts the right to detain U.S. citizens without charges as enemy combatants. This claimed authority is based on the assertion that the United States is at war and the American homeland is part of the battlefield. "In the war against terrorists of global reach, as the nation learned all too well on Sept. 11, 2001, the territory of the United States is part of the battlefield," Bush's lawyers argued in briefs to the federal courts. Given Bush's now open assertions that he is using his "plenary" -- or unlimited -- powers as commander in chief for the duration of the indefinite War on Terror, Americans can no longer trust that their constitutional rights protect them from government actions. As former Vice President Al Gore asked after recounting a litany of sweeping powers that Bush has asserted to fight the War on Terror, "Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is 'yes,' then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited?" In such extraordinary circumstances, the American people might legitimately ask exactly what the Bush administration means by the "rapid development of new programs," which might require the construction of a new network of detention camps. Comment: Not only Muslims, just as the camps in Nazi Germany were not used exclusively for Jews. Dissidents formed a large segment of the population...

Russia warns US on Caspian buildup IRIB News 16 Mar 06 Moscow, March 14 - Russia cautioned the United States on Tuesday against raising its military presence in the strategic Caspian sea region bordering Iran, saying buildup of forces from "outside" would destabilize the region, Itar-Tass news agency said. Russia "is opposed to the presence of third-party military forces on the Caspian," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at the start of a meeting among representatives of the five countries that border the sea: Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. His comments were seen as directed at the United States, which has stationed military advisors in Azerbaijan and is helping that country upgrade its naval forces and two powerful radar stations. Itar-Tass also quoted Lavrov however as saying that Russia was not calling for withdrawal of all military forces from the Caspian sea region, which is known to hold vast oil and gaz resources. "Demilitarization of the Caspian does not correspond to the realities of today," Lavrov said, adding that such a goal would lead to "the disarmament of Caspian states that are confronting new threats." "Not creating threats from the outside due to the presence of military forces from third countries is the guarantee that there will no longer be any pretext for conflicts in the region," Lavrov said.

The Changing Face of Terror By Mike Whitney Information Clearing House 15 Mar 06 Ever since the attacks on 9-11 we have heard one slogan reiterated more frequently than any other, "Everything changed on September 11". The phrase has become the motto for transforming America according to the policy objectives of the men in power. In fact, the criminal conduct of government officials and their wars of aggression have all been causally brushed aside by invoking their keynote defense, "Everything changed"! September 11 has been the most abused and manipulated public relations scam in history. It is trotted out in every presidential speech, every executive press conference, and every appearance by an administration official. It is routinely used to undermine the rule of law and to vindicate the despotic powers of the president. "Everything changed"; "The gloves came off"; "We must accept the new realities of the post 9-11 world". September 11 has become the defining moment in human history; the seminal event that provides the meager justification for butchery and repression. The United States is now gripped by a form of low-grade state terror; the twin-axels of fear and deception keep the imperial bandwagon gliding along its path. America has been subsumed in a swamp of paranoia and lies; clearing the way for future hostilities and greater brutality. Everything changed. We know now that every breach of the law, every assault on tradition, every illegal war was perfectly timed to coincide with the "galvanizing moment"; a "Pearl Harbor-type event" that would rally the public behind their war president and begin the long, descent into iniquity. The Patriot Act was prepared and ready for approval well before 9-11, just as the NSA program of blanket-spying on the American people began shortly after. Rumsfeld was already looking for excuses to attack Iraq just hours after the Towers fell, and in a matter of months, White House attorneys would be building a legal defense for the cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners. Was this merely coincidence or was the Bush administration already prepared for the transition to dictatorship? Treaties were shredded, civil liberties were savaged, and every obstacle to presidential authority was removed. Now, the only principle the Bush administration adheres to is the fundamental belief that it is above the law. In Iraq we see a mirror-image of the radical ideology that energizes domestic policy. The daily slaughter of innocent people is papered-over by a slick public relations campaign disparaging terror and touting liberation. Again, we see the twin-axels of fear and deception rotating simultaneously. The promises of reconstruction, democracy, and security have disappeared behind the daily onslaught of cluster-bombs, death squads, malnutrition, poisoned water, unemployment, and despair. New Orleans is only different by a matter of degrees. America's "Jewel of the South" has been transformed into a garrison city, replete with armored vehicles, fully-armed military personnel, and contingents of corporate paramilitaries. If riots had broken out, we would have seen a reenactment of Falluja-type justice dispensed by Army regulars and Cheney's mercenaries. In the 6 months since Hurricane Katrina, the administration has not provided funds for the reconstruction of even one home in the region. Bush's abhorrence to "nation building" has been faithfully honored in New Orleans as well as Baghdad. The American public has been dumbstruck by the extent of the governments' callousness. This country has never seen capitalism stripped of its adornments; a predatory, mean-spirited system that discards its own people when profit is not involved. In Iraq, fear and deception are the driving forces behind the policy. The MSM has played a major role by providing bogus information that is designed to mislead the public. Can we believe the media when they refer to "suicide bombers" or "sectarian violence" without evidence? Isn't the moniker "suicide bomber" loaded with political bias; suggesting crazed, Muslim fanatics who have no regard for their own lives or the lives of others? Where's the proof? Couldn't it be a device that the media purposely uses to reinforce racial stereotypes and, thus, support the war-effort? The same rule applies to sectarian violence. The phrase "sectarian violence" is meant to imply that this is not America's war at all, but that we are simply innocent bystanders keeping the warring parties from killing each other. What rubbish. The term "sectarian violence" suggests that the media knows who is detonating the bombs, provoking ethnic tensions, and producing the mountains of carnage. But do they? Most of them are locked up in the Palestine Hotel all day, polishing up the narrative they are provided by the Pentagon. The media reports what they are told to report and most of it is nothing more than the verbatim statements from administration and military officials. Who could read the papers or listen to the news and not draw that very same conclusion? Perhaps, there is a far more sinister force behind the seemingly random bombings that alternate between Shiite and Sunni communities. Perhaps, they are being ignited by people who want to see Iraq broken up into mini-statelets that are less threatening to the occupying army? Perhaps, they are part of a massive covert operation intended to weaken resistance and spread anarchy throughout the region? Perhaps, Iraq, like America, is being controlled by men who believe that terror is the most effective way to govern. At least that would explain why "everything has changed".

The elite effort to subvert democracy By DEREK LEHNECKE Napa Valley Register March 14, 2006 Elite control to subvert democracy is quite explicit when one sees the great rift between public policy and public opinion. A Pew Research Center poll showed that Americans believed the U.S. should mind its own business internationally. Three of four American troops serving in Iraq agreed, saying they should withdraw and end the war in Iraq, according to a Zogby-Le Moyne College poll surveyed by face-to-face interviews with soldiers. Unfortunately, public opinion does not guide domestic or foreign policy and we won't be leaving Iraq anytime soon. The vice president said that the "War on Terror" is a "war which will not end in our lifetimes." The Program on International Policy Attitudes polled Americans' attitudes toward the last federal budget. Where spending is going up (military, Iraq, Afghanistan), Americans wanted it to go down. Areas where the budget was decreasing -- social spending, education, renewable energy, support for the United Nations -- people wanted it to go up. The 2007 federal budget is more of the same. A huge majority wanted to reverse the tax cuts for the wealthy. "Democracy" is a term we hear ad nauseum by the president's speechwriters and apparatchiks, but the word does not approximate our reality. The fantasies propagated about our government and economy start in our schools, which according to the Trilateral Commission are responsible for the "indoctrination of the young." The unthinking public continues to be deluded by massive state-corporate propaganda campaigns on all fronts. The deception justifying the illegal invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of the greatest achievements of American propaganda. The anti-Iran propaganda is working, as more than half of Americans think Iran is a threat to their existence. The driving motive of the invasion is to retain American global hegemony by controlling the last remaining significant energy reserves left on the planet. What this means is U.S. planners will attempt to rule the world and destroy the social contract here at home to pay for future imperial wars. Petroleum geologists are not popular and their warnings of Peak Oil are underreported by the "liberal media." A 2004 meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas in Berlin included representatives from BP, ExxonMobil and the International Energy Agency. A U.K. observer at the ASPO stated "for the record, Ghawar's (the world's largest oil reservoir, located in Saudi Arabia) ultimate recoverable reserves in 1975 were estimated at 60 billion barrels -- by ExxonMobil, Texaco, and Chevron. It had produced 55 billion barrels up to the end of 2003 and is still producing at 1.8 billion per annum. That shows you how close it might be to the end. When Ghawar dies, the world is officially in decline." Matthew Simmons, CEO of Simmons and Co. International, the world's largest private energy investment bank, believes the Saudis are "out of capacity." Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham concludes, "America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades. The failure to meet this challenge will threaten our nation's economic prosperity, compromise our national security and literally alter the way we lead our lives." Richard Heinberg's book, "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," presents what will be the most significant event in human history -- the imminent decline of cheap oil -- and what we can do about it. The current administration was inaugurated by stealing two elections, placed war criminals in key government positions, was complicit in facilitating 9/11 attacks, lied to the American people for the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, contravened international law, used and still uses "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has subverted the Constitution. We live in a criminal state. The planet is facing an ecological crisis that will be irreversible if we continue with our system of waste, fraud, pollution and voracious resource depletion. Humanity was in "a race between education and catastrophe," according to H.G. Wells. Implementing a "power-down" strategy involves reducing "resource usage in wealthy countries, developing alternative energy sources, distributing resources more equitably, and reducing the human population humanely but systematically over time. It could save us, but will require tremendous effort and economic sacrifice." The inevitable confrontation with Mother Nature -- to rid itself of the human parasite and preside over the collapse of our unsustainable economic system -- is imminent. The question is whether a democratic global economy will evolve sooner or later. If later, we will sink to a level of barbarism never seen before. If sooner, we can work forging communities based on solidarity, mutual aid, tolerance and sustainability that will improve the quality of life and mitigate the damage done to the planet's fragile ecosystem that we are so dependent on.

Flashback: Nazis of the Nineties By Abid Ullah Jan 5 Jan 98 In his book "The Road to Serfdom," Friedrich Hayek warned Americans in 1944 that despite their military war against Nazis, they were travelling the philosophical and economic road to that the Nazis were travelling. The Americans ignored that warning. Now along the Americans we are left with the consequences that are coming home to roost in the nineties: a government of omnipotent size and power using its power to kill innocent, peaceful citizens at home and abroad. Today, the number of its victims is in the millions. But at the end of this road lie the deadly bombing and concentration camps for the multitudes. The name of the new game to be played in the last year of the twentieth century is "catastrophic terrorism" and it has been made frightening, not because it conceivably could really happen but because of what people who choose to dwell on the possibility, however remote, want to do about it. The anti-biological and anti-weapons of mass destruction American propaganda and actions are already duplicating Hitler's prior to World War-II tactics. Any further terrorism from now onwards would be justified in the name of combating "catastrophic terrorism," which is defined as going far beyond what the US Secretary of Defence William Cohen calls "the conventional type of terrorism." That is the work of "cowards," he says, who "rejoice in the agony of their victims." They then "retreat to villages where they hide behind the skirts of women and the laughter of children and dare you to strike back - and strike back we will." "We have to depend upon intervention" he declared on December 8, 1998 and the same views have been expressed by Ashton Carter, John Deusch and Philip Zelikow, two former high-level Defence Department Officials, and a former staff member of National Security Council, in the Foreign Affairs magazine. This propaganda would justify the US armed attack in any part of the world as "prevention" of the sensed danger. Afghanistan and Sudan were probably the first victims of an undeclared Nazi agenda for dominating the world. The word "Nazi" might offend some Americans but a thorough research can pale Nazi atrocities by comparison with what the US has done and is doing in the name of national interest. CIA, with the help of CNN, BBC and ABC etc., is waging a major propaganda war against the Muslim world in particular, with the help of capitalist media elite and some powerful politicians. Their lies were once totally disregarded by most people, but today, the majority of the people seem to believe the anti "rouge states" propaganda. We still have to many people, who do not believe that the present American attempts are leading to a US world order and total domination of those nations, which are considered anti-American. They, like the unbelievers in 1939, will not take the time to research the American intentions and wrong doings. If they did, they would see that these warnings are indeed accurate and timely. What the world fails or refuses to recognise is that the concentration camps were simply the logical extension of the Nazi agenda and mind-set. It doesn't matter if there were six million killed - or six hundred - or six - or even one. The evil is the belief that the US government should have the power to sacrifice even one individual for the good of the American "nation" and "interest." Once this basic philosophical premise and political power are conceded, innocent people, beginning with few and inevitable ending in multitudes, will be killed, because "the good of the nation" always ends up requiring it. The UN and rest of the world seem to have conceded this authority to the US so that it freely exercise its Nazi practices. On the one hand we have the anti-Islam movement, whose main propaganda themes seem to be that (1) the so-called Islamic fundamentalism is the root of all evil, (2) weapons of mass destruction should be kept away from the Islamic and unfriendly states, and (3) that the US and its allies are the only hope against the spreading plague of fundamentalism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler's main propaganda themes seem to be that (1) Jews and Jewry are the root of all evil, and (2) that Germany was World's best hope against the spreading communist revolution. On the other hand, political killings of innocent people could never happened in the US. But it is happening in American, today. And like the German people of the 1930s, Americans either refuse to see it happening, or they rationalise what is happening so that they do not have to deal with it. For instance, the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas: More than eighty peaceful, religious Americans, including children were gassed and burned. The government officials, just like the Nazi counterparts, think they did "the right thing." The judge who presided over the trial of the Waco survivors declared that he would not permit the government to be "put on trial," and then slapped forty-year sentences on the survivors. Or take Randy Weaver, his wife and son of Idaho. First they were set up on an idiotic gun charge. Then, they sent Weaver a notice of a wrong trial date. And finally they surrounded his house and attacked, shooting his son in the back and killing his wife. Then, at the trial the government fabricated the evidence and committed perjury. Weaver was acquitted. But no criminal charges have been brought against the government agents. Well, did the Nazi government even bring charges against the SS? Did Nazi judges ever punish Nazi officials for killing the Jews? From killing of millionaire Donald Scott of California, to nuclear radiation experiments on soldiers, to drug experiments on the citizens, to the thousands of arrests and confiscation worth millions of dollars, the Americans have rationalised what is happening by saying, "The Feds gotta do it for us." No longer the government needs to depend only on taxes for its revenue - its agents just go grab the money and property directly and keep it regardless of the guilt or innocence of the victims. And it doesn't end with killings and confiscation. It is also terror - the terror of IRS agents barging into people's homes, "visiting" them at work and levying liens on bank accounts and real estate with notice, hearing or other semblance of due process. On international level, we observe that Hitler's words have been put to practice in the form of CNN and BBC. According to Hitler, "the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses towards certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses' field of vision." We can see this at CNN and BBC, as they also stick to a few main points and repeat them over and over. How many times do they draw out attention to the "Saddam's weapons of mass destruction," threat of the "Islamic fundamentalists" and "international terrorism"? Rather than use many different issues as examples of their propaganda, they concentrate on a handful of well-known incidents. Hitler believed that propaganda had to be very simple, so the average person, with very short attention span, could understand it. The thesis is: "If any terrorism conceivably could happen, we must assume that it will, and do something about it now, before it is too late." This is itself the very essence of psychological terrorism that the world community is constantly ignoring. The world leaders and members of the Security Council didn't take any notice of the remarks made by former chief UN weapon inspector Scott Ritter. Mr. Ritter said that US officials "prodded inspection teams to return to Iraq to provoke a crisis to justify bombing." So the US conducted its mission of mass destruction without any effective condemnation or solid resistance from any nation. Justification for the action was the same that Iraq "could conceivably be a threat some day." Policy of the Nazis of the nineties is now being established in such a manner that any nation capable of posing a threat to US interests at any time in the future is a legitimate target for American attacks. It is the intention of the Nazis in Washington to so bring the nations into such despair that they will gladly give themselves over to the new despotism. They are prepared to give up their hopes and dreams, their religions and economies for the brief promise of rest from the turmoils placed before them. The Nazi regime of the thirties set out to gain control by focusing on three main areas: regulatory, persuasive and intimidatory. Regulation is being done through different UN resolution and their selective enforcement; persuasion is being done through electronic and print media and intimidation through missile strikes from the pirate ships. Resolutions passed by the Security Council in the early nineties have been the catalyst to the transformation of US to a nazified, and the world as a whole to be its centralised state. In late thirties, the history was transformed to emphasise the superiority of German civilisation, with German heroes coming to the forefront. German failures were either left out of the unit or blamed on the Jews. The same is happening in the late nineties with the American heroes giving details of their ruthless bombings on the CNN with pride in militarism. Like Nazis, the US administration wants to create a static world society whereby nations act unquestionably, and do little thinking for themselves. Look again at the battle for the New World Order. Are we taking time to study the issue individually before reaching a conclusion? No, rather we see images on BBC and CNN of the dead bodies in Nairobi and in the streets of Israel. We see victims in pain and we see next of kin crying over lost loved ones. We allow our emotions to take over, and base our opinion on these emotions, rather than sober consideration. CNN has become the most effective brainwashing tool, showing no victims of the 400 cruise missiles they way they show Israeli victims of a single Hizbollah rocket. None of us try to wait and reach to the root causes of the issue before making a pro-American mind after seeing these images. They say "might is right" but this saying cannot be proven in actual history. "Might" just falls harder when it is "not right." The US actions may not have surpassed the Nazi atrocities. But that's today. Desert Fox operation is today. Tomorrow it might be Operation von Manteufeel against Iran. Operation von Rundstedt against Pakistan. And what would happen at home in the US during such crisis. Suppose the operations are not over in a few weeks, but instead drag on into months and years, with higher taxes, more controls and...conscription. What happens if Americans, who are already being taxed 50 per cent of their incomes, now find taxes at 70 or 80 per cent? What happens if hundreds of American students refuse to be drafted by the president who refused to be drafted? Will the American government simply agree to lose "international face" or its federal agencies will turn their massive powers against the leaders of the revolt and teach the draft-dodging cowards a lesson in concentration camps. As the whole world will be facing a catastrophic Third World War, the American people will learn what the German people learned at a lesser cost: that the omnipotent state that loves the poor and the needy will remove its velvet glove and use its iron fist to smash those who interfere with the "good of the nation." © 2002 Independnet Centre for Strategic Studies and Analysis (ICSSA).

Flashback: Machiavellian Realism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Means and Ends By Howard Zinn, 1991 from the Zinn Reader While teaching courses in political theory at Boston University, and fascinated by the figure of Machiavelli, I came across the remarkable volume by Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Rennaisance, with its brilliant portraits of the dissident Savonarola and the toady Machiavelli. At the same time I noted the respect with which Machiavelli was treated by people on all parts of the political spectrum. The Vietnam War led many people, including myself, to look more closely at the history of United States foreign policy, and to me there was a distinct Machiavellian thread running through that history. This essay appeared in my book Declarations of Independence (HarperCollins,1991). Interests: The Prince and the Citizen About 500 years ago modern political thinking began. Its enticing surface was the idea of "realism." Its ruthless center was the idea that with a worthwhile end one could justify any means. Its spokesman was Nicolo Machiavelli. In the year 1498 Machiavelli became adviser on foreign and military affairs to the government of Florence, one of the great Italian cities of that time. After fourteen years of service, a change of government led to his dismissal, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in the countryside outside of Florence. During that time he wrote, among other things, a little book called The Prince, which became the world's most famous hand book of political wisdom for governments and their advisers. Four weeks before Machiavelli took office, something happened in Florence that made a profound impression on him. It was a public hanging. The victim was a monk named Savonarola, who preached that people could be guided by their "natural reason." This threatened to diminish the importance of the Church fathers, who then showed their importance by having Savonarola arrested. His hands were bound behind his back and he was taken through the streets in the night, the crowds swinging lanterns near his face, peering for the signs of his dangerousness. Savonarola was interrogated and tortured for ten days. They wanted to extract a confession, but he was stubborn. The Pope, who kept in touch with the torturers, complained that they were not getting results quickly enough. Finally the right words came, and Savonarola was sentenced to death. As his body swung in the air, boys from the neighbor hood stoned it. The corpse was set afire, and when the fire had done its work, the ashes were strewn in the river Arno. In The Prince, Machiavelli refers to Savonarola and says, "Thus it comes about that all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed." Political ideas are centered on the issue of ends (What kind of society do we want?) and means (How will we get it?). In that one sentence about unarmed prophets Machiavelli settled for modern governments the question of ends: conquest. And the question of means: force. Machiavelli refused to be deflected by utopian dreams or romantic hopes and by questions of right and wrong or good and bad. He is the father of modern political realism, or what has been called realpolilik. "It appears to me more proper to go to the truth of the matter than to its imagination...for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation." It is one of the most seductive ideas of our time. We hear on all sides the cry of "be realistic...you're living in the real world," from political platforms, in the press, and at home. The insistence on building more nuclear weapons, when we already possess more than enough to destroy the world, is based on "realism." The Wall Street Journal, approving a Washington, D.C., ordinance allowing the police to arrest any person on the street refusing to move on when ordered, wrote, "D.C.'s action is born of living in the real world." And consider how often a parent (usually a father) has said to a son or daughter: "It's good to have idealistic visions of a better world, but you're living in the real world, so act accordingly." How many times have the dreams of young people-the desire to help others; to devote their lives to the sick or the poor; or to poetry, music, or drama-been demeaned as foolish romanticism, impractical in a world where one must "make a living"? Indeed, the economic system reinforces the same idea by rewarding those who spend their lives on "practical" pursuits-while making life difficult for the artist, poets, nurses, teachers, and social workers. Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of someone else's description of reality. When Machiavelli claims to "go to the truth of the matter," he is making the frequent claim of important people (writers, political leaders) who press their ideas on others: that their account is "the truth," that they are being "objective." But his reality may not be our reality; his truth may not be our truth. The real world is infinitely complex. Any description of it must be a partial description, so a choice is made about what part of reality to describe, and behind that choice is often a definite interest, in the sense of something useful for a particular individual or group. Behind the claim of someone giving us an objective picture of the real world is the assumption that we all have the same interests, and so we can trust the one who describes the world for us, because that person has our interests at heart. It is very important to know if our interests are the same, because a description is never simply neutral and innocent; it has consequences. No description is merely that. Every description is in some way a prescription. If you describe human nature as Machiavelli does, as basically immoral, it suggests that it is realistic, indeed only human, that you should behave that way too. The notion that all our interests are the same (the political leaders and the citizens, the millionaire and the homeless person) deceives us. It is a deception useful to those who run modern societies, where the sup port of the population is necessary for the smooth operation of the machinery of everyday life and the perpetuation of the present arrangements of wealth and power. When the Founding Fathers of the United States wrote the Preamble to the Constitution, their first words were, "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice..." The Constitution thus looked as if it were written by all the people, representing their interests. In fact, the Constitution was drawn up by fifty-five men, all white and mostly rich, who represented a certain elite group in the new nation. The document itself accepted slavery as legitimate, and at that time about one of every five persons in the population was a black slave. The conflicts between rich and poor and black and white, the dozens of riots and rebellions in the century before the Revolution, and a major uprising in western Massachusetts just before the convening of the Constitutional Convention (Shays' Rebellion) were all covered over by the phrase "We the people." Machiavelli did not pretend to a common interest. He talked about what "is necessary for a prince." He dedicated The Prince to the rich and powerful Lorenzo di Medici, whose family ruled Florence and included popes and monarchs. ( The Columbia Encyclopedia has this intriguing description of the Medici: "The genealogy of the family is complicated by the numerous illegitimate offspring and by the tendency of some of the members to dispose of each other by assassination.") In exile, writing his handbook of advice for the Medici, Machiavelli ached to be called back to the city to take his place in the inner circle. He wanted nothing more than to serve the prince. In our time we find greater hypocrisy. Our Machiavellis, our presidential advisers, our assistants for national security, and our secretaries of state insist they serve "the national interest," "national security," and "national defense." These phrases put everyone in the country under one enormous blanket, camouflaging the differences between the interest of those who run the government and the interest of the average citizen. The American Declaration of Independence, however, clearly understood that difference of interest between government and citizen. It says that the purpose of government is to secure certain rights for its citizens-life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. But governments may not fulfill these purposes and so "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government." The end of Machiavelli's The Prince is clearly different. It is not the welfare of the citizenry, but national power, conquest, and control. All is done in order "to maintain the state." In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli. Our language is more deceptive than his; the purpose of foreign policy, our leaders say, is to serve the "national interest," fulfill our "world responsibility." In 1986 General William Westmoreland said that during World War II the United States "inherited the mantle of leadership of the free world" and "became the international champions of liberty." This, from the man who, as chief of military operations in the Vietnam War, con ducted a brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese noncombatants. Sometimes, the language is more direct, as when President Lyndon Johnson, speaking to the nation during the Vietnam War, talked of the United States as being "number one." Or, when he said, "Make no mistake about it, we will prevail." Even more blunt was a 1980 article in the influential Foreign Affairs by John Hopkins political scientist Robert W. Tucker; in regard to Central America, he wrote, "we have regularly played a determining role in making and in unmaking governments, and we have defined what we have considered to be the acceptable behavior of governments. "Tucker urged "a policy of a resurgent America to prevent the coming to power of radical regimes in Central America" and asked, "Would a return to a policy of the past work in Central America?... There is no persuasive reason for believing it would not....Right-wing governments will have to be given steady outside support, even, if necessary, by sending in American forces. Tucker's suggestion became the Central America policy of the Reagan administration, as it came into office in early 1981. His "sending in American forces" was too drastic a step for an American public that clearly opposed another Vietnam (unless done on a small scale, like Reagan's invasion of Grenada, and Bush's invasion of Panama). But for the following eight years, the aims of the United States were clear; to over throw the left-wing government of Nicaragua and to keep in place the right-wing government of El Salvador. Two Americans who visited El Salvador in 1983 for the New York City Bar Association described for the New York Times a massacre of eighteen peasants by local troops in Sonsonate province: Ten military advisers are attached to the Sonsonate armed forces... The episode contains all the unchanging elements of the Salvadoran tragedy- uncontrolled military violence against civilians, the apparent ability of the wealthy to procure official violence...and the presence of United States military advisers, working with the Salvadoran military responsible for these monstrous practices... after 30,000 unpunished murders by security and military forces and over 10,000 "disappearances" of civilians in custody, the root causes of the killings remain in place, and the killing goes on. The purpose of its policy in Central America, said the U.S. government, was to protect the country from the Soviet threat: a Soviet base in Nicaragua and a possible Soviet base in El Salvador. This was not quite believable. Was the Soviet Union prepared to launch an invasion of the United States from Central America? Was a nation that could not win a war on its borders with Afghanistan going to send an army across the Atlantic Ocean to Nicaragua? And what then? Would that army then march up through Honduras into Guatemala, then through all of Mexico, into Texas, and then...? It was as absurd as the domino theory of the Vietnam War, in which the falling dominos of Southeast Asia would have had to swim the Pacific to get to San Francisco. Did the Soviet Union, with intercontinental ballistic missiles, with submarines off the coast of Long Island, need Central America as a base for attacking the United States? Nevertheless, the Kissinger Commission, set up by President Reagan to advise him on Central American policy, warned in its report that our "southern flank" was in danger-a biological reference designed to make all of us nervous. Even a brief look at history was enough to make one skeptical. How could we explain our frequent interventions in Central America before 1917, before the Bolshevik Revolution? How could we explain our taking control of Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898; our seizure of the Canal Zone in 1903; our dispatch of marines to Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Guatemala in the early 1900s; our bombardment of a Mexican town in 1914; and our long military occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic starting in 1915 and 1916? All this before the Soviet Union existed. There was another official reason given for U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s: to "restore democracy." This, too, was hardly believable. Throughout the period after World War II our government had supported undemocratic governments, indeed vicious military dictatorships; in Batista's Cuba, Somoza's Nicaragua, Armas's Guatemala, Pinoche's Chile, and Duvalier's Haiti as well as in El Salvador and other countries of Latin America. The actual purpose of U.S. policy in Central America was expressed by Tucker in the most clear Machiavellian terms: "The great object of American foreign policy ought to be the restoration of a more normal political world, a world in which those states possessing the elements of great power once again play the role their power entitles them to play." Undoubtedly, there are Americans who respond favorably to this idea, that the United States should be a "great power" in the world, should dominate other countries, should be number one. Perhaps the assumption is that our domination is benign and that our power is used for kindly purposes. The history of our relations with Latin America does not suggest this. Besides~ it really in keeping with the American ideal of equality of all peoples to insist that we have the right to control the affairs of other countries? Are we the only country entitled to a Declaration of Independence? Means:The Lion and the Fox There should be clues to the rightness of the ends we pursue by examining the means we use to achieve those ends. I am assuming there is always some connection between ends and means. All means become ends in the sense that they have immediate consequences apart from the ends they are supposed to achieve. And all ends are themselves means to other ends. Was there not a link, for Machiavelli, between his crass end- power for the prince-and the various means he found acceptable? For a year Machiavelli was ambassador to Cesare Borgia, conqueror of Rome. He describes one event that "is worthy of note and of imitation by others." Rome had been disorderly, and Cesare Borgia decided he needed to make the people "peaceful and obedient to his rule." Therefore, "he appointed Messer Remirro de Orco, a cruel and able man, to whom he gave the fullest authority" and who, in a short time, made Rome "orderly and united." But Cesare Borgia knew his policies had aroused hatred, so, in order to purge the minds of the people and to win them over completely, he resolved to show that if any cruelty had taken place it was not by his orders, but through the harsh disposition of his minister. And having found the opportunity he had him cut in half and placed one morning in the public square at Cesena with a piece of wood and blood-stained knife by his side. In recent American history, we have become familiar with the technique of rulers letting subordinates do the dirty work, which they can later disclaim. As a result of the Watergate scandals in the Nixon administration (a series of crimes committed by underlings in his behalf), a number of his people (former CIA agents, White House aides, and even the attorney-general) were sent to prison. But Nixon himself, although he was forced to resign his office, escaped criminal prosecution, arranging to be pardoned when his vice-president, Gerald Ford, became president. Nixon retired in prosperity and, in a few years, became a kind of elder statesman, a Godfather of politics, looked to for sage advice. Perhaps as a way of calming the public in that heated time of disillusionment with the government because of Vietnam and Watergate, a Senate committee in 1974-1975 conducted an investigation of the intelligence agencies. It discovered that the CIA and the FBI had violated the law countless times (opening mail, breaking into homes and offices, etc.). In the course of that investigation, it was also revealed that the CIA, going back to the Kennedy administration, had plotted the assassination of a number of foreign rulers, including Cuba's Fidel Castro. But the president himself, who clearly was in favor of such actions, was not to be directly involved, so that he could deny knowledge of it. This was given the term plausible denial. As the committee reported: Non-attribution to the United States for covert operations was the original and principal purpose of the so-called doctrine of "plausible denial." Evidence before the Committee clearly demonstrates that this concept, designed to protect the United States and its operatives from the consequences of disclosures, has been expanded to mask decisions of the president and his senior staff members. In 1988, a story in a Beirut magazine led to information that Ronald Reagan's administration had been secretly selling arms to Iran, the declared enemy of the United States, and using the proceeds to give military aid to counterrevolutionaries ( the "contras" ) in Nicaragua, thus violating an act passed by Congress. Reagan and Vice President Bush denied involvement, although the evidence pointed very strongly to their participation. Instead of impeaching them, however, congress put their emissaries on the witness stand, and later several of them were indicted. One of them (Robert McFarland) tried to commit suicide. Another, Colonel Oliver North, stood trial for Iying to Congress, was found guilty, but was not sentenced to prison. Reagan was not compelled to testify about what he had done. He retired in peace and Bush became the next president of the United States, both beneficiaries of plausible denial. Machiavelli would have admired the operation. A prince, Machiavelli suggested, should emulate both the lion and the fox. The lion uses force. "The character of peoples varies, and it is easy to persuade them of a thing, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion. And so it is necessary to order things so that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.... Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force." The fox uses deception. If all men were good, this would not be good advice, but since they are dishonest and do not keep faith with you, you, in return, need not keep faith with them; and no prince was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith.... The experience of our times shows those princes to have done great things who have had little regard for good faith, and have been able by astuteness to confuse men's brains. This advice for the prince has been followed in our time by all sorts of dictators and generalissimos. Hitler kept a copy of The Prince at his bedside, it is said. (Who says? How do they know?) Mussolini used Machiavelli for his doctoral dissertation. Lenin and Stalin are also sup posed to have read Machiavelli. Certainly the Italian Communist Gramsci wrote favorably about Machiavelli, claiming that Machiavelli was not really giving advice to princes, who knew all that already, but to "those who do not know," thus educating "those who must recognize certain necessary means, even if those of tyrants, because they want certain ends." The prime ministers and presidents of modern democratic states, despite their pretensions, have also admired and followed Machiavelli. Max Lerner, a prominent liberal commentator on the post-World War II period, in his introduction to Machiavelli's writings, says of him: "The common meaning he has for democrats and dictators alike is that, what ever your ends, you must be clear-eyed and unsentimental in pursuit of them." Lerner finds in Machiavelli's Discourses that one of his important ideas is "the need in the conduct even of a democratic state for the will to survive and therefore for ruthless instead of half-hearted measures." Thus the democratic state, behaving like the lion, uses force when 7 persuasion does not work. It uses it against its own citizens when they cannot be persuaded to obey the laws. It uses it against other peoples in the act of war, not always in self-defense, but often when it cannot persuade other nations to do its bidding. For example, at the start of the twentieth century, although Colombia was willing to sell the rights to the Panama Canal to the United States, it wanted more money than the United States was willing to pay. So the warships were sent on their way, a little revolution was instigated in Panama, and soon the Canal Zone was in the hands of the United States. As one U.S. Senator described the operation, ''We stole it fair and square. The modern liberal state, like a fox, often uses deception to gain its ends-not so much deception of the foreign enemy (which, after all, has little faith in its adversaries), but of its own citizens, who have been taught to trust their leaders. One of the important biographies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt is titled Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. Roosevelt deceived the American public at the start of World War II, in September and October 1941, misstating the facts about two instances involving German sub marines and American destroyers (claiming the destroyer Greer, which was attacked by a German submarine, was on an innocent mission when in fact it was tracking the sub for the British Navy). A historian sympathetic to him wrote, "Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor... He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient's own good." Then there were the lies of President John Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk when they told the public the United States was not responsible for the 1961 invasion of Cuba, although in fact the invasion had been organized by the CIA. The escalation of the war in Vietnam started with a set of lies- in August 1964-about incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin. The United States announced two "unprovoked" attacks on U.S. destroyers by North Vietnamese boats. One of them almost certainly did not take place. The other was undoubtedly provoked by the proximity (ten miles) of the destroyer to the Vietnamese coast and by a series of CIA-organized raids on the coast. The lies then multiplied. One of them was President Johnson's statement that the U.S. Air Force was only bombing "military targets." Another was a deception by President Richard Nixon; he concealed from the American public the 1969-1970 massive bombing of Cambodia, a country with which we were supposed to be at peace. The Advisers Advisers and assistants to presidents, however committed they are in their rhetoric to the values of modern liberalism, have again and again participated in acts of deception that would have brought praise from Machiavelli. His goal was to serve the prince and national power. So was theirs. Because they were advisers to a liberal democratic state, they assumed that advancing the power of such a state was a moral end, which then justified both force and deception. But cannot a liberal state carry out immoral policies? Then the adviser (deceiving himself this time) would consider that his closeness to the highest circles of power put him in a position to affect, even reverse, such policies. It was a contemporary of Machiavelli, Thomas More, who warned intellectuals about being trapped into service to the state and about the self-deception in which the adviser believes he will be a good influence in the higher councils of the government. In More's book Utopia, spokesperson Raphael is offered the advice commonly given today to young people who want to be social critics, prodding the government from outside, like Martin Luther King or Ralph Nader. The advice is to get on the inside. Raphael is told, "I still think that if you could overcome the aversion you have to the courts of princes, you might do a great deal of good to mankind by the advice that you would give." Raphael replies, "If I were at the court of some king and proposed wise laws to him and tried to root out of him the dangerous seeds of evil, do you not think I would either be thrown out of his court or held in scorn?" He goes on,Imagine me at the court of the King of France. Suppose I were sitting in his council with the King himself presiding, and that the wisest men were earnestly discussing by what methods and intrigues the King might keep Milan, recover Naples so often lost, then overthrow the Venetians and sub due all Italy, and add Flanders, Brabant, and even all Burgundy to his realm, besides some other nations he had planned to invade. Now in all this great ferment, with so many brilliant men planning together how to carry on war, imagine so modest a man as myself standing up and urging them to change all their plans. More might have been describing the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., adviser to President Kennedy, who thought it was "a terrible idea" to go ahead with the CIA Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, two years after the revolution there. But he did not raise his voice in protest, because, as he later admitted, he was intimidated by the presence of "such august figures as the Secretaries of State and Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff." He wrote, "In the months after the Bay of Pigs I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the Cabinet room." But-the intimidation of Schlesinger-as-adviser went beyond silencing him in the cabinet room-it led him to produce a nine-page memorandum to President Kennedy, written shortly before the invasion of Cuba, in which he is as blunt as Machiavelli himself in urging deception of the public to conceal the U.S. role in the invasion. This would be necessary because "a great many people simply do not at this moment see that Cuba presents so grave and compelling a threat to our national security as to justify a course of action which much of the world will interpret as calculated aggression against a small nation." The memorandum goes on, "The character and repute of President Kennedy constitute one of our greatest national resources. Nothing should be done to jeopardize this invaluable asset. When lies must be told, they should be told by subordinate officials." It goes on to suggest "that someone other than the President make the final decision and do so in his absence-someone whose head can later be placed on the block if things go terribly wrong." (Cesare Borgia again, only lacking the bloodstained knife.) Schlesinger included in his memo sample questions and Iying answers in case the issue of the invasion came up in a press conference: Q. Mr. President, is CIA involved in this affair? A. I can assure you that the United States has no intention of using force to overthrow the Castro regime. The scenario was followed. Four days before the invasion President Kennedy told a press conference, "There will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by U.S. armed forces." Schlesinger was just one of dozens of presidential advisers who behaved like little Machiavellis in the years when revolutions in Vietnam and Latin America brought hysterical responses on the part of the U.S. government. These intellectuals could see no better role for themselves than to serve national power. Kissinger, secretary of state to Nixon, did not even have the mild qualms of Schlesinger. He surrendered himself with ease to the princes of war and destruction. In private discussions with old colleagues from Harvard who thought the Vietnam War immoral, he presented himself as someone trying to bring it to an end, but in his official capacity he was the willing intellectual tool of a policy that involved the massive killing of civilians in Vietnam. Kissinger approved the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, an act so disruptive of the delicate Cambodian society that it can be considered an important factor in the rise of the murderous Pol Pot regime in that country. After he and the representatives of North Vietnam had negotiated a peace agreement to end the war in late 1972, he approved the breaking off of the talks and the brutal bombardment of residential districts in Hanoi by the most ferocious bombing plane of the time, the B52. Kissinger's biographers describe his role "If he had disapproved of Nixon's policy, he could have argued against the Cambodia attack. But there is no sign that he ever mustered his considerable influence to persuade the president to hold his fire. Or that he ever considered resigning in protest. Quite the contrary, Kissinger supported the policy." During the Christmas 1972 bombings New York Times columnist James Reston wrote: It may be and probably is true, that Mr. Kissinger as well as Secretary of State Rogers and most of the senior officers in the State Department are opposed to the President's bombing offensive in North Vietnam.... But Mr. Kissinger is too much a scholar, with too good a sense of humor and history, to put his own thoughts ahead of the president's. It seems that journalists too, can be Machiavellian. Serving National Powers Machiavelli never questioned that national power and the position of the prince were proper ends: "And it must be understood that a prince...cannot observe all those things which are considered good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religion." The end of national power may be beneficial to the prince, and even to the prince's advisers, an ambitious lot. But why should it be assumed as a good end for the average citizen? Why should the citizen tie his or her fate to the nation-state, which is perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives and liberties of its own citizens for the power, the profit, and the glory of politicians or corporate executives or generals? For a prince, a dictator, or a tyrant national power is an end unquestioned. A democratic state, however, substituting an elected president for a prince, must present national power as benign, serving the interests of liberty, justice, and humanity. If such a state, which is surrounded with the rhetoric of democracy and liberty and, in truth, has some measure of both, engages in a war that is clearly against a vicious and demonstrably evil enemy, then the end seems so clean and clear that any means to defeat that enemy may seem justified. Such a state was the United States and such an enemy was fascism, represented by Germany, Italy, and Japan. Therefore, when the atomic bomb appeared to be the means for a quicker victory, there was little hesitation to use it. Very few of us can imagine ourselves as presidential advisers, having to deal with their moral dilemmas (if, indeed, they retain enough integrity to consider them dilemmas). It is much easier, I think, for aver age citizens to see themselves in the position of the scientists who were secretly assembled in New Mexico during World War II to make the atomic bomb. We may be able to imagine our own trade or profession, our particular skills, called on to serve the policies of the nation. The scientists who served Hitler, like the rocket expert Werner von Braun, could be as cool as Machiavelli in their subservience; they would serve national power without asking questions. They were professionals, totally consumed with doing "a good job" and they would do that job for whoever happened to be in power. So, when Hitler was defeated and von Braun was brought by military intelligence agents to the United States, he cheer fully went ahead and worked on rockets for the United States, as he had done for Hitler. As one satirical songwriter put it: Once the rockets are Up, Who cares where they come down? That's not our department, Says Werner von Braun. The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were not like that. One cannot imagine them turning to Hitler and working for him if he were victorious. They were conscious, in varying degrees, that this was a war against fascism and that it was invested with a powerful moral cause. Therefore, to build this incredibly powerful weapon was to use a terrible means, but for a noble end. And yet there was one element these scientists had in common with Werner von Braun: the sheer pleasure of doing a job well, of professional competence, and of scientific discovery, all of which could make one forget, or at least put in the background, the question of human con sequences. After the war, when the making of a thermonuclear bomb was proposed, a bomb a thousand times more destructive that the one dropped on Hiroshima, J. Robert Oppenheimer, personally horrified by the idea, was still moved to pronounce the scheme of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam for producing it as "technically sweet." Teller, defending the project against scientists who saw it as genocidal, said, "The important thing in any science is to do the things that can be done." And, what ever Enrico Fermi's moral scruples were (he was one of the top scientists in the Manhattan Project), he pronounced the plan for making the bombs "superb physics." Robert Jungk, a German researcher who interviewed many of the scientists involved in the making of the bomb, tried to understand their lack of resistance to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. "They felt them selves caught in a vast machinery and they certainly were inadequately informed as to the true political and strategic situation." But he does not excuse their inaction. "If at any time they had had the moral strength to protest on purely humane grounds against the dropping of the bomb, their attitude would no doubt have deeply impressed the president, the Cabinet and the generals." Using the atomic bombs on populated cities was justified in moral terms by American political leaders. Henry Stimson, whose Interim Committee had the job of deciding whether or not to use the atomic bomb, said later it was done "to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies." This was based on the assumption that without atomic bombs, an invasion of Japan would be necessary, which would cost many American lives. It was a morality limited by nationalism, perhaps even racism. The saving of American lives was considered far more important than the saving of Japanese lives. Numbers were wildly thrown into the air (for example, Secretary of State James Byrnes talked of "a million casualties" resulting from an invasion), but there was no attempt to seriously estimate American casualties and weigh that against the consequences for Japanese men and women, old people and babies. (The closest to such an attempt was a military estimate that an invasion of the southernmost island of Japan would cause 30,000 American dead and wounded.) The evidence today is overwhelming that an invasion of Japan was not necessary to bring the war to an end. Japan was defeated, in disarray, and ready to surrender. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which interviewed 700 Japanese military and political officials after the war, came to this conclusion: Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. After the war American scholar Robert Butow went through the papers of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the records of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (which tried Japanese leaders as war criminals), and the interrogation files of the U.S. Army. He also interviewed many of the Japanese principals and came to this conclusion: "Had the Allies given the Prince (Prince Konoye, special emissary to Moscow, who was working on Russian intercession for peace) a week of grace in which to obtain his Government's support for the acceptance of the proposals, the war might have ended toward the latter part of July or the very beginning of the month of August, without the atomic bomb and without Soviet participation in the conflict." On July 13, 1945, three days before the successful explosion of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico, the United States intercepted Japanese Foreign Minister Togo's secret cable to Ambassador Sato in Moscow, asking that he get the Soviets to intercede and indicating that Japan was ready to end the war, so long as it was not unconditional surrender. On August 2, the Japanese foreign office sent a message to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, "There are only a few days left in which to make arrangements to end the war.... As for the definite terms... it is our intention to make the Potsdam Three-Power Declaration [which called for unconditional surrender] the basis of the study regarding these terms." Barton Bernstein, a Stanford historian who has studied the official documents closely, wrote: This message, like earlier ones, was probably intercepted by American intelligence and decoded. It had no effect on American policy. There is not evidence that the message was sent to Truman and Byrnes [secretary of state], nor any evidence that they followed the intercepted messages during the Potsdam conference. They were unwilling to take risks in order to save Japanese lives. In his detailed and eloquent history of the making of the bomb, Richard Rhodes says, "The bombs were authorized not because the Japanese refused to surrender but because they refused to surrender unconditionally. " The one condition necessary for Japan to end the war was an agreement to maintain the sanctity of the Japanese emperor, who was a holy figure to the Japanese people. Former ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, based on his knowledge of Japanese culture, had been trying to persuade the U.S. government of the importance of allowing the emperor to remain in place. Herbert Feis, who had unique access to State Department files and the records on the Manhattan Project, noted that in the end the United States did give the assurances the Japanese wanted on the emperor. He writes, "The curious mind lingers over the reasons why the American government waited so long before offering the Japanese those various assurances which it did extend later." Why was the United States in a rush to drop the bomb, if the reason of saving lives turns out to be empty, if the probability was that the Japanese would have surrendered even without an invasion? Historian Gar Alperovitz, after going through the papers of the American officials closest to Truman and most influential in the final decision, and especially the diaries of Henry Stimson, concludes that the atomic bombs were dropped to impress the Soviet Union, as a first act in establishing American power in the postwar world. He points out that the Soviet Union had promised to enter the war against Japan on August 8. The bomb was dropped on August 6. The scientist Leo Szilard had met with Truman's main policy adviser in May 1945 and reported later: "Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war.... Mr. Byrnes' view was that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable." The end of dropping the bomb seems, from the evidence, to have been not winning the war, which was already assured, not saving lives, for it was highly probably no American invasion would be necessary, but the aggrandizement of American national power at the moment and in the postwar period. For this end, the means were among the most awful yet devised by human beings-burning people alive, maiming them horribly and leaving them with radiation sickness, which would kill them slowly and with great pain. I remember my junior-high-school social studies teacher telling the class that the difference between a democracy like the United States and the "totalitarian states" was the "they believe that the end justifies any means, and we do not." But this was before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To make a proper moral judgment, we would have to put into the balancing the testimony of the victims. Here are the words of three survivors, which would have to be multiplied by tens of thousands to give a fuller picture. A thirty-five-year-old man: "A woman with her jaw missing and her tongue hanging out of her mouth was wandering around the area of Shinsho-machi in the heavy, black rain. She was heading toward the north crying for help." A seventeen-year-old girl: "I walked past Hiroshima Station...and saw people with their bowels and brains coming out.... I saw an old lady carrying a suckling infant in her arms...I saw many children...with dead mothers...I just cannot put into words the horror I felt." A fifth-grade girl: "Everybody in the shelter was crying out loud. Those voices...they aren't cries, they are moans that penetrate to the mar row of your bones and make your hair stand on end... I do not know how many times I called begging that they would cut off my burned arms and legs." In the summer of 1966, my wife and I were invited to an international gathering in Hiroshima to commemorate the dropping of the bomb and to dedicate ourselves to a world free of warfare. On the morn ing of August G, tens of thousands of people gathered in a park in Hiroshima and stood in total, almost unbearable, silence, awaiting the exact moment-8:1G A.M.-when on August 6, 1945, the bomb had been dropped. When the moment came, the silence was broken by a sudden roaring sound in the air, eerie and frightening until we realized it was the sound of the beating of wings of thousands of doves, which had been released at that moment to declare the aim of a peaceful world. A few days later, some of us were invited to a house in Hiroshima that had been established as a center for victims of the bomb to spend time with one another and discuss common problems. We were asked to speak to the group. When my turn came, I stood up and felt I must get something off my conscience. I wanted to say that I had been an air force bombardier in Europe, that I had dropped bombs that killed and maimed people, and that until this moment I had not seen the human results of such bombs, and that I was ashamed of what I had done and wanted to help make sure things like that never happened again. I never got the words out, because as I started to speak I looked out at the Japanese men and women sitting on the floor in front of me, without arms, or without legs, but all quietly waiting for me to speak. I choked on my words, could not say anything for a moment, fighting for control, finally managed to thank them for inviting me and sat down. For the idea that any means-mass murder, the misuse of science, the corruption of professionalism-are acceptable to achieve the end of national power, the ultimate example of our time is Hiroshima. For us, as citizens, the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggests that we reject Machiavelli, that we do not accept subservience, whether to princes or presidents, and that we examine for ourselves the ends of public policy to determine whose interests they really serve. We must examine the means used to achieve those ends to decide if they are compatible with equal justice for all human beings on earth. The Anti-Machiavellians There have always been people who did things for themselves, against the dominant ideology, and when there were enough of them history had its splendid moments: a war was called to a halt, a tyrant was overthrown, an enslaved people won its freedom, the poor won a small victory. Even some people close to the circles of power, in the fade of overwhelming pressure to conform have summoned the moral strength to dissent, ignoring the Machiavellian advice to leave the end unquestioned and the means unexamined. Not all the atomic scientists rushed into the excitement of building the bomb. When Oppenheimer was recruiting for the project, as he later told the Atomic Energy Commission, most people accepted. "This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed." However, the physicist I. I. Rabi, asked by Oppenheimer to be his associate director at Los Alamos, refused to join. He was heavily involved in developing radar, which he thought important for the war, but he found it abhorrent, as Oppenheimer reported, that "the culmination of three centuries of physics" should be a weapon of mass destruction. Just before the bomb was tested and used, Rabi worried about the role of scientists in war: If we take the stand that our object is merely to see that the next war is bigger and better, we will ultimately lose the respect of the public.... We will become the unpaid servants of the munitions makers and mere technicians rather than the self-sacrificing public-spirited citizens which we feel ourselves to be. Nobel Prize-winning physical chemist James Franck, working with the University of Chicago metallurgical laboratory on problems of building the bomb, headed a committee on social and political implications of the new weapon. In June 1945, the Franck Committee wrote a report advising against a surprise atomic bombing of Japan: "If we consider international agreement on total prevention of nuclear warfare as a paramount objective...this kind of introduction of atomic weapons to the world may easily destroy all our chances of success." Dropping the bomb "will mean a flying start toward an unlimited armaments race," the report said. The committee went to Washington to deliver the report person ally to Henry Stimson, but were told, falsely, that he was out of the city. Neither Stimson nor the scientific panel advising him was in a mood to accept the argument of the Franck Report. Scientist Leo Szilard, who had been responsible for the letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt suggesting a project to develop an atomic bomb, also fought a hard but futile battle against the bomb being dropped on a Japanese city. The same month that the bomb was success fully tested in New Mexico, July 1945, Szilard circulated a petition among the scientists, protesting in advance against the dropping of the bomb, arguing that "a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale." Determined to do what he could to stop the momentum toward using the bomb, Szilard asked his friend Einstein to give him a letter of introduction to President Roosevelt. But just as the meeting was being arranged, an announcement came over the radio that Roosevelt was dead. Would Einstein's great prestige have swayed the decision? It is doubtful. Einstein, known to be sympathetic to socialism and pacifism, was excluded from the Manhattan Project and did not know about the momentous decisions being made to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One adviser to Harry Truman took a strong position against the atomic bombing of Japan: Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard. As a member of Stimson's Interim Committee, at first he agreed with the decision to use the bomb on a Japanese city, but then changed his mind. He wrote a memorandum to the committee talking about the reputation of the United States "as a great humanitarian nation" and suggesting the Japanese be warned and that some assurance about the treatment of the emperor might induce the Japanese to surrender. It had no effect. A few military men of high rank also opposed the decision. General Dwight Eisenhower, fresh from leading the Allied armies to victory in Europe, met with Stimson just after the successful test of the bomb in Los Alamos. He told Stimson he opposed use of the bomb because the Japanese were ready to surrender. Eisenhower later recalled, "I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." General Hap Arnold, head of the army air force, believed Japan could be brought to surrender without the bomb. The fact that important military leaders saw no need for the bomb lends weight to the idea that the reasons for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki were political. In the operations of U.S. foreign policy after World War II, there were a few bold people who rejected Machiavellian subservience and refused to accept the going orthodoxies. Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas was at the crucial meeting of advisers when President Kennedy was deciding whether to proceed with plans to invade Cuba. Arthur Schlesinger, who was there, wrote later that "Fulbright, speaking in an emphatic and incredulous way, denounced the whole idea." During the Vietnam War, advisers from MIT and Harvard were among the fiercest advocates of ruthless bombing, but a few rebelled. One of the earliest was James Thomson, a Far East expert in the State Department who resigned his post and wrote an eloquent article in the Atlantic Monthly criticizing the U.S. presence in Vietnam. While Henry Kissinger was playing Machiavelli to Nixon's prince, at least three of his aides objected to his support for an invasion of Cambodia in 1970. William Watts, asked to coordinate the White House announcement on the invasion of Cambodia, declined and wrote a letter of resignation. He was confronted by Kissinger aide General Al Haig, who told him, "You have an order from your Commander in Chief." He, therefore, could not resign, Haig said, Watts replied, "Oh yes I can-and I have!" Roger Morris and Anthony Lake, asked to write the speech for President Nixon justifying the invasion, refused and instead wrote a joint letter of resignation. The most dramatic action of dissent during the war in Vietnam came from Daniel Ellsberg, a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard who had served in the Marines and held important posts in the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the embassy in Saigon. He had been a special assistant to Henry Kissinger and then worked for the Rand Corporation a private "think tank" of brainy people who contracted to do top-secret research for the U.S. government. When the Rand Corporation was asked to assemble a history of the Vietnam War, based on secret documents, Ellsberg was appointed as one of the leaders of the project. But he had already begun to feel pangs of conscience about the brutality of the war being waged by his government. He had been out in the field with the military, and what he saw persuaded him that the United States did not belong in Vietnam. Then, reading the documents and helping to put together the history, he saw how many lies had been told to the public and was reinforced in his feelings. With the help of a former Rand employee he had met in Vietnam, Anthony Russo, Ellsberg secretly photocopied the entire 7,000 page history-the "Pentagon Papers" as they came to be called-and distributed them to certain members of Congress as well as to the New York Times. When the Times, in a journalistic sensation, began printing this "top-secret" document, Ellsberg was arrested and put on trial. The counts against him could have brought a prison sentence of 130 years. But while the jury deliberated the judge learned, through the Watergate scandal, that Nixon's "plumbers" had tried to break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to find damaging material and he declared the case tainted and called off the trial. Ellsberg's was only one of a series of resignations from government that took place during and after the Vietnam War. A number of operatives of the CIA quit their jobs in the late sixties and early seventies and began to write and speak about the secret activities of the agency- for example, Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, John Stockwell, Frank Snepp, and Ralph McGehee. For the United States, as for others countries, Machiavellianism dominates foreign policy, but the courage of a small number of dissenters suggests the possibility that some day the larger public will no longer accept that kind of "realism." Machiavelli himself might have smiled imperiously at this suggestion, and said, "You're wasting your time. Nothing will change. It's human nature." That claim is worth exploring.

U.S. may veto bid for UN condemnation of Israeli jail siege By Haaretz Service and agencies 15 Mar 06 The threat of a U.S. veto hovers over planned closed-door deliberations Wednesday over Qatar's bid for a UN Security Council to condemn Israel's Jericho jail siege and its capture of the killers of former cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi. A draft statement by Qatari Ambassador Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, representing Arab nations, would have condemned "Israel's violent incursion" in besieging the Jericho jail, and would have demanded that Israel return the prisoners it seized "and to return the situation to that which existed prior to the Israeli military attack." Security forces went on high alert Tuesday fearing Palestinian reprisal attacks after Israel Defense Forces troops laid siege to the Jericho prison and arrested six wanted inmates. A tense, gunfire-punctuated nine-hour IDF siege of a Jericho prison complex ended after dark on Tuesday with the abrupt surrender of Ahmed Sa'adat and five other Palestinian militants. Sa'adat, leader of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, is believed to have ordered the assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi in a Jerusalem hotel in 2001. One of the other militants was Fuad Shobaki, the alleged mastermind of an illegal mass weapons shipment to the Palestinian Authority in 2002. The six arrested wanted militants are to be held in prison in Israel, officials said. The PFLP threatened that "Israel will pay a heavy price for the operation." Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke with Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz and asked them to keep military forces on high alert. In New York, council diplomats said the 15-nation council would discuss the draft behind closed doors on Wednesday after Al-Nasser revised it overnight in response to council members' initial comments, diplomats said. Palestinian UN Observer Riyad Mansour called on the council to "uphold international law" by supporting the Qatari measure. He said the Israeli raid grew out of "a desire to negate the Palestinian elections" won by Hamas. But the text would almost certainly face a veto from the United States, Israel's closest ally, if brought to a vote in its current form, the diplomats said. The drama began early in the day, when American and British monitors supervising the detention of the six left the prison. The monitors had been stationed there as part of a compromise reached between Israel and the PA, which had guaranteed Israel that it would keep Ze'evi's killers behind bars. The monitors were withdrawn in response to a statement last week by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who said that he was prepared to free Sa'adat, drawing an angry response from Israel. Abbas said Tuesday that the British and American monitors bore "full responsibility" for the raid. One of the five PFLP members had vowed earlier on Tuesday that the group would not surrender. "Our prison is surrounded on all sides by Israelis. They are asking us over loudspeaker to come out," Ahed Abu Ghoulmi, one of the targeted prisoners. "We will not come out under any circumstances." "We are not going to surrender. We are going to face our destiny with courage," Sa'adat later told the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera. Security Council issues milder statement As a result of the dispute over the wording of the UN resolution, the council issued a milder statement Tuesday afternoon. It expressed concern about an upsurge in violence, urged all sides to exercise restraint, and called for the release of foreigners who were kidnapped in retaliation. Representing Arab nations on the council and backed by the Palestinian government, Qatar distributed a draft presidential statement that would call on Israel to end its "continued onslaught" against the Palestinian-run prison. A second, milder resolution is expected to be introduced on Wednesday. Mofaz: No politics in timing of operation Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz of Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party Wednesday dismissed criticism of the Jericho siege as politically motivated. The timing of the siege was tied entirely to decisions by the Palestinians, and had nothing to do with the fact that elctions are two weeks away. Asked if there was such a link, Mofaz told Army Radio: "Certainly not. About a week before, we knew that it could happen any day, after the [British] sent a clear letter that the Palestinians were violating the agreement, but did someone plan the timing of this?? "We didn't know that Ahmed Sa'adat would be freed. That was the decision of [Hamas leader and PA prime minister-designate] Ismail Haniyeh. We didn't decide that the British and American monitors would leave, in fear for their safety, in view of the fact that a Hamas government was about to arise. Asked if the IDF would have acted in any case, had the monitors remained in place, Mofaz said "If the monitors had remained in place and watched over what was happening there, apparently not. I say apparently, because we don?t know how things would have unfolded in the future.? The evening surrender that came at 6:45 P.M. followed heavy gunfire directed at the prison complex. Large numbers of soldiers surrounded the prison, where six Palestinian militants were jailed. Three Palestinians were reportedly killed in exchanges of fire with IDF soldiers. GOC Central Command Yair Naveh expressed regret at their deaths, noting the operation was not aimed at the PA security forces, but rather at arresting the six wanted inmates.

America can't block UN's new human rights body By Mark Coultan Herald Correspondent in New York March 17, 2006 AGAINST strong American opposition the United Nations has overwhelmingly voted to establish a new body to promote human rights around the world. In an unusual split with the US, Australia was one of the 170 countries that supported a new body to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. The Human Rights Council will have upgraded status, will be a standing body which meets regularly - the old commission met for just a few weeks each year - and hold special sessions to deal with a crisis. The new council is one of the more important UN changes which the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has been calling for, and which came out of the summit of world leaders last September. Mr Annan had condemned the Human Rights Commission, saying it had been discredited by human rights abusers who joined to protect themselves from criticism, or to criticise another country. Countries such as Sudan and Burma could be elected because of a system of bloc or regional voting. The new body will be elected by the entire General Assembly. The US was one of just four countries to oppose the new body, and demanded that each country's vote be recorded. Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau also voted against it. John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, said the council was not a sufficient improvement from the old commission. He railed against compromises which had been agreed to in order to get majority support for the council. But the president of the General Assembly, Sweden's Jan Eliasson, refused to reopen negotiations. Russia, Cuba, Pakistan and some Arab countries were among those reported to have been ready to try to impose their own ideas on the council if it had been reopened for negotiation. Mr Bolton said the US objected to dropping the requirement that two-thirds of the countries in the General Assembly had to support a candidate state for it to be elected to the council. Instead, members will be elected by a simple majority. Mr Bolton also said that countries which were subject to sanctions for human rights abuses or for supporting terrorism should also be barred. Australia, in a joint statement with New Zealand and Canada, said it would have liked a two-thirds requirement for membership, and tougher provisions for preventing abusers of human rights being elected, but voted in favour anyway. But they said they would not vote for any country that abused human rights. The first vote for the council will be in May.

No Longer the "Lone" Superpower - Coming to Terms with China By Chalmers Johnson TomDispatch.com 15 Mar 06 I recall forty years ago, when I was a new professor working in the field of Chinese and Japanese international relations, that Edwin O. Reischauer once commented, "The great payoff from our victory of 1945 was a permanently disarmed Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at Harvard, Reischauer served as American ambassador to Tokyo in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Strange to say, since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and particularly under the administration of George W. Bush, the United States has been doing everything in its power to encourage and even accelerate Japanese rearmament. Such a development promotes hostility between China and Japan, the two superpowers of East Asia, sabotages possible peaceful solutions in those two problem areas, Taiwan and North Korea, left over from the Chinese and Korean civil wars, and lays the foundation for a possible future Sino-American conflict that the United States would almost surely lose. It is unclear whether the ideologues and war lovers of Washington understand what they are unleashing -- a possible confrontation between the world's fastest growing industrial economy, China, and the world's second most productive, albeit declining, economy, Japan; a confrontation which the United States would have both caused and in which it might well be consumed. Let me make clear that in East Asia we are not talking about a little regime-change war of the sort that Bush and Cheney advocate. After all, the most salient characteristic of international relations during the last century was the inability of the rich, established powers -- Great Britain and the United States -- to adjust peacefully to the emergence of new centers of power in Germany, Japan, and Russia. The result was two exceedingly bloody world wars, a forty-five-year-long Cold War between Russia and the "West," and innumerable wars of national liberation (such as the quarter-century long one in Vietnam) against the arrogance and racism of European, American, and Japanese imperialism and colonialism. The major question for the twenty-first century is whether this fateful inability to adjust to changes in the global power-structure can be overcome. Thus far the signs are negative. Can the United States and Japan, today's versions of rich, established powers, adjust to the reemergence of China -- the world's oldest, continuously extant civilization -- this time as a modern superpower? Or is China's ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war, when the pretensions of European civilization in its U.S. and Japanese projections are finally put to rest? That is what is at stake. Alice-in-Wonderland Policies and the Mother of All Financial Crises China, Japan, and the United States are the three most productive economies on Earth, but China is the fastest growing (at an average rate of 9.5% per annum for over two decades), whereas both the U.S. and Japan are saddled with huge and mounting debts and, in the case of Japan, stagnant growth rates. China is today the world's sixth most productive economy (the U.S. and Japan being first and second) and our third largest trading partner after Canada and Mexico. According to CIA statisticians in their Factbook 2003, China is actually already the second-largest economy on Earth measured on a purchasing power parity basis -- that is, in terms of what China actually produces rather than prices and exchange rates. The CIA calculates the United States' gross domestic product (GDP) -- the total value of all goods and services produced within a country -- for 2003 as $10.4 trillion and China's $5.7 trillion. This gives China's 1.3 billion people a per capita GDP of $5,000. Between 1992 and 2003, Japan was China's largest trading partner, but in 2004 Japan fell to third place, behind the European Union (EU) and the United States. China's trade volume for 2004 was $1.2 trillion, third in the world after the U.S. and Germany, and well ahead of Japan's $1.07 trillion. China's trade with the U.S. grew some 34% in 2004 and has turned Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland into the three busiest seaports in America. The truly significant trade development of 2004 was the EU's emergence as China's biggest economic partner, suggesting the possibility of a Sino-European cooperative bloc confronting a less vital Japanese-American one. As Britain's Financial Times observed, "Three years after its entry into the World Trade Organization [in 2001], China's influence in global commerce is no longer merely significant. It is crucial." For example, most Dell Computers sold in the U.S. are made in China, as are the DVD players of Japan's Funai Electric Company. Funai annually exports some 10 million DVD players and television sets from China to the United States, where they are sold primarily in Wal-Mart stores. China's trade with Europe in 2004 was worth $177.2 billion, with the United States $169.6 billion, and with Japan $167.8 billion. China's growing economic weight in the world is widely recognized and applauded, but it is China's growth rates and their effect on the future global balance of power that the U.S. and Japan, rightly or wrongly, fear. The CIA's National Intelligence Council forecasts that China's GDP will equal Britain's in 2005, Germany's in 2009, Japan's in 2017, and the U.S.'s in 2042. But Shahid Javed Burki, former vice president of the World Bank's China Department and a former finance minister of Pakistan, predicts that by 2025 China will probably have a GDP of $25 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity and will have become the world's largest economy followed by the United States at $20 trillion and India at about $13 trillion -- and Burki's analysis is based on a conservative prediction of a 6% Chinese growth rate sustained over the next two decades. He foresees Japan's inevitable decline because its population will begin to shrink drastically after about 2010. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs reports that the number of men in Japan already declined by 0.01% in 2004; and some demographers, it notes, anticipate that by the end of the century the country's population could shrink by nearly two-thirds, from 127.7 million today to 45 million, the same population it had in 1910. By contrast China's population is showing signs of stabilizing at approximately 1.4 billion people, and is heavily weighted toward males. (The government-imposed one-child-per-family policy and the availability of sonograms have resulted in a ratio of 129 boys born for every 100 girls; 147 boys for every 100 girls for couples seeking second or third children.) Chinese domestic economic growth is expected to continue for decades, reflecting the pent-up demand of its huge population, relatively low levels of personal debt, and a dynamic underground economy not recorded in official statistics. Most important, China's external debt is relatively small and easily covered by its reserves; whereas both the U.S. and Japan are approximately $7 trillion in the red, which is worse for Japan with less than half the U.S. population and economic clout. Ironically, part of Japan's debt is a product of its efforts to help prop up America's global imperial stance. For example, in the period since the end of the Cold War, Japan has subsidized America's military bases in Japan to the staggering tune of approximately $70 billion. Refusing to pay for its profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through taxes on its own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by going into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and India. This situation has become increasingly unstable as the U.S. requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for its governmental expenditures. Any decision by East Asian central banks to move significant parts of their foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and into the euro or other currencies in order to protect themselves from dollar depreciation would produce the mother of all financial crises. Japan still possesses the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, which at the end of January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But China sits on a $609.9 billion pile of dollars (as of the end of 2004), earned from its trade surpluses with us. Meanwhile, the American government and Japanese followers of George W. Bush insult China in every way they can, particularly over the status of China's breakaway province, the island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst William Greider recently noted, "Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise, to put it mildly. . . . American leadership has . . . become increasingly delusional -- I mean that literally -- and blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it." The Bush administration is unwisely threatening China by urging Japan to rearm and by promising Taiwan that, should China use force to prevent a Taiwanese declaration of independence, the U.S. will go to war on its behalf. It is hard to imagine more shortsighted, irresponsible policies, but in light of the Bush administration's Alice-in-Wonderland war in Iraq, the acute anti-Americanism it has generated globally, and the politicization of America's intelligence services, it seems possible that the U.S. and Japan might actually precipitate a war with China over Taiwan. Japan Rearms Since the end of World War II, and particularly since gaining its independence in 1952, Japan has subscribed to a pacifist foreign policy. It has resolutely refused to maintain offensive military forces or to become part of America's global military system. Japan did not, for example, participate in the 1991 war against Iraq, nor has it joined collective security agreements in which it would have to match the military contributions of its partners. Since the signing in 1952 of the Japan-United States Security Treaty, the country has officially been defended from so-called external threats by U.S. forces located on some 91 bases on the Japanese mainland and the island of Okinawa. The U.S. Seventh Fleet even has its home port at the old Japanese naval base of Yokosuka. Japan not only subsidizes these bases but subscribes to the public fiction that the American forces are present only for its defense. In fact, Japan has no control over how and where the U.S. employs its land, sea, and air forces based on Japanese territory, and the Japanese and American governments have until quite recently finessed the issue simply by never discussing it. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States has repeatedly pressured Japan to revise article nine of its Constitution (renouncing the use of force except as a matter of self-defense) and become what American officials call a "normal nation." For example, on August 13, 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated baldly in Tokyo that if Japan ever hoped to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council it would first have to get rid of its pacifist Constitution. Japan's claim to a Security Council seat is based on the fact that, although its share of global GDP is only 14%, it pays 20% of the total U.N. budget. Powell's remark was blatant interference in Japan's internal affairs, but it merely echoed many messages delivered by former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the leader of a reactionary clique in Washington that has worked for years to remilitarize Japan and so enlarge a major new market for American arms. Its members include Torkel Patterson, Robin Sakoda, David Asher, and James Kelly at State; Michael Green on the National Security Council's staff; and numerous uniformed military officers at the Pentagon and at the headquarters of the Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. America's intention is to turn Japan into what Washington neo-conservatives like to call the "Britain of the Far East" -- and then use it as a proxy in checkmating North Korea and balancing China. On October 11, 2000, Michael Green, then a member of Armitage Associates, wrote, "We see the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain as a model for the [U.S.-Japan] alliance." Japan has so far not resisted this American pressure since it complements a renewed nationalism among Japanese voters and a fear that a burgeoning capitalist China threatens Japan's established position as the leading economic power in East Asia. Japanese officials also claim that the country feels threatened by North Korea's developing nuclear and missile programs, although they know that the North Korean stand-off could be resolved virtually overnight -- if the Bush administration would cease trying to overthrow the Pyongyang regime and instead deliver on American trade promises (in return for North Korea's agreement to give up its nuclear weapons program). Instead, on February 25, 2005, the State Department announced that "the U.S. will refuse North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's demand for a guarantee of 'no hostile intent' to get Pyongyang back into negotiations over its nuclear weapons programs." And on March 7, Bush nominated John Bolton to be American ambassador to the United Nations even though North Korea has refused to negotiate with him because of his insulting remarks about the country. Japan's remilitarization worries a segment of the Japanese public and is opposed throughout East Asia by all the nations Japan victimized during World War II, including China, both Koreas, and even Australia. As a result, the Japanese government has launched a stealth program of incremental rearmament. Since 1992, it has enacted 21 major pieces of security-related legislation, 9 in 2004 alone. These began with the International Peace Cooperation Law of 1992, which for the first time authorized Japan to send troops to participate in U.N. peacekeeping operations. Remilitarization has since taken many forms, including expanding military budgets, legitimizing and legalizing the sending of military forces abroad, a commitment to join the American missile defense ("Star Wars") program -- something the Canadians refused to do in February 2005 -- and a growing acceptance of military solutions to international problems. This gradual process was greatly accelerated in 2001 by the simultaneous coming to power of President George Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Koizumi made his first visit to the United States in July of that year and, in May of 2003, received the ultimate imprimatur, an invitation to Bush's "ranch" in Crawford, Texas. Shortly thereafter, Koizumi agreed to send a contingent of 550 troops to Iraq for a year, extended their stay for another year in 2004, and on October 14, 2004, personally endorsed George Bush's reelection. A New Nuclear Giant in the Making? Koizumi has appointed to his various cabinets hard-line anti-Chinese, pro-Taiwanese politicians. Phil Deans, director of the Contemporary China Institute in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, observes, "There has been a remarkable growth of pro-Taiwan sentiment in Japan. There is not one pro-China figure in the Koizumi Cabinet." Members of the latest Koizumi Cabinet include the Defense Agency chief Yoshinori Ono, and the foreign minister Nobutaka Machimura, both ardent militarists; while Foreign Minister Machimura is a member of the right-wing faction of former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, which supports an independent Taiwan and maintains extensive covert ties with Taiwanese leaders and businessmen. Taiwan, it should be remembered, was a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945. Unlike the harsh Japanese military rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945, it experienced relatively benign governance by a civilian Japanese administration. The island, while bombed by the Allies, was not a battleground during World War II although it was harshly occupied by the Chinese Nationalists (Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang) immediately after the war. Today, as a result, many Taiwanese speak Japanese and have a favorable view of Japan. Taiwan is virtually the only place in East Asia where Japanese are fully welcomed and liked. Bush and Koizumi have developed elaborate plans for military cooperation between their two countries. Crucial to such plans is the scrapping of the Japanese Constitution of 1947. If nothing gets in the way, Koizumi's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) intends to introduce a new constitution on the occasion of the party's fiftieth anniversary in November 2005. This has been deemed appropriate because the LDP's founding charter of 1955 set as a basic party goal the "establishment of Japan's own Constitution" -- a reference to the fact that General Douglas MacArthur's post-World War II occupation headquarters actually drafted the current Constitution. The original LDP policy statement also called for "the eventual removal of U.S. troops from Japanese territory," which may be one of the hidden purposes behind Japan's urge to rearm. A major goal of the Americans is to gain Japan's active participation in their massively expensive missile defense program. The Bush administration is seeking, among other things, an end to Japan's ban on the export of military technology, since it wants Japanese engineers to help solve some of the technical problems of its so far failing Star Wars system. The United States has also been actively negotiating with Japan to relocate the Army's 1st Corps from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo in the densely populated prefecture of Kanagawa, whose capital is Yokohama. These U.S. forces in Japan would then be placed under the command of a four-star general, who would be on a par with regional commanders like Centcom commander John Abizaid, who lords it over Iraq and South Asia. The new command would be in charge of all Army "force projection" operations beyond East Asia and would inevitably implicate Japan in the daily military operations of the American empire. Garrisoning even a small headquarters, much less the whole 1st Corps made up of an estimated 40,000 soldiers, in a sophisticated and centrally located prefecture like Kanagawa is also guaranteed to generate intense public opposition as well as rapes, fights, car accidents and other incidents similar to the ones that occur daily in Okinawa. Meanwhile, Japan intends to upgrade its Defense Agency (Boeicho) into a ministry and possibly develop its own nuclear weapons capability. Goading the Japanese government to assert itself militarily may well cause the country to go nuclear in order to "deter" China and North Korea, while freeing Japan from its dependency on the American "nuclear umbrella." The military analyst Richard Tanter notes that Japan already has "the undoubted capacity to satisfy all three core requirements for a usable nuclear weapon: a military nuclear device, a sufficiently accurate targeting system, and at least one adequate delivery system." Japan's combination of fully functioning fission and breeder reactors plus nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities gives it the ability to build advanced thermonuclear weapons; its H-II and H-IIA rockets, in-flight refueling capacity for fighter bombers, and military-grade surveillance satellites assure that it could deliver its weapons accurately to regional targets. What it currently lacks are the platforms (such as submarines) for a secure retaliatory force in order to dissuade a nuclear adversary from launching a pre-emptive first-strike. The Taiwanese Knot Japan may talk a lot about the dangers of North Korea, but the real objective of its rearmament is China. This has become clear from the ways in which Japan has recently injected itself into the single most delicate and dangerous issue of East Asian international relations -- the problem of Taiwan. Japan invaded China in 1931 and was its wartime tormentor thereafter as well as Taiwan's colonial overlord. Even then, however, Taiwan was viewed as a part of China, as the United States has long recognized. What remains to be resolved are the terms and timing of Taiwan's reintegration with the Chinese mainland. This process was deeply complicated by the fact that in 1987 Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, who had retreated to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil war (and were protected there by the American Seventh Fleet ever after), finally ended martial law on the island. Taiwan has since matured into a vibrant democracy and the Taiwanese are now starting to display their own mixed opinions about their future. In 2000, the Taiwanese people ended a long monopoly of power by the Nationalists and gave the Democratic Progressive Party, headed by President Chen Shui-bian, an electoral victory. A native Taiwanese (as distinct from the large contingent of mainlanders who came to Taiwan in the baggage train of Chiang's defeated armies), Chen stands for an independent Taiwan, as does his party. By contrast, the Nationalists, together with a powerful mainlander splinter party, the People First Party headed by James Soong (Song Chuyu), hope to see an eventual peaceful unification of Taiwan with China. On March 7, 2005, the Bush administration complicated these delicate relations by nominating John Bolton to be the American ambassador to the United Nations. He is an avowed advocate of Taiwanese independence and was once a paid consultant to the Taiwanese government. In May 2004, in a very close and contested election, Chen Shui-bian was reelected, and on May 20, the notorious right-wing Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara attended his inauguration in Taipei. (Ishihara believes that Japan's 1937 Rape of Nanking was "a lie made up by the Chinese.") Though Chen won with only 50.1% of the vote, this was still a sizeable increase over his 33.9% in 2000, when the opposition was divided. The Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately appointed Koh Se-kai as its informal ambassador to Japan. Koh has lived in Japan for some 33 years and maintains extensive ties to senior political and academic figures there. China responded that it would "completely annihilate" any moves toward Taiwanese independence -- even if it meant scuttling the 2008 Beijing Olympics and good relations with the United States. Contrary to the machinations of American neo-cons and Japanese rightists, however, the Taiwanese people have revealed themselves to be open to negotiating with China over the timing and terms of reintegration. On August 23, 2004, the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan's parliament) enacted changes in its voting rules to prevent Chen from amending the Constitution to favor independence, as he had promised to do in his reelection campaign. This action drastically lowered the risk of conflict with China. Probably influencing the Legislative Yuan was the warning issued on August 22 by Singapore's new prime minister, Lee Hsien-loong: "If Taiwan goes for independence, Singapore will not recognize it. In fact, no Asian country will recognize it. China will fight. Win or lose, Taiwan will be devastated." The next important development was parliamentary elections on December 11, 2004. President Chen called his campaign a referendum on his pro-independence policy and asked for a mandate to carry out his reforms. Instead he lost decisively. The opposition Nationalists and the People First Party won 114 seats in the 225-seat parliament, while Chen's DPP and its allies took only 101. (Ten seats went to independents.) The Nationalist leader, Lien Chan, whose party won 79 seats to the DPP's 89, said, "Today we saw extremely clearly that all the people want stability in this country." Chen's failure to capture control of parliament also meant that a proposed purchase of $19.6 billion worth of arms from the United States was doomed. The deal included guided-missile destroyers, P-3 anti-submarine aircraft, diesel submarines, and advanced Patriot PAC-3 anti-missile systems. The Nationalists and James Soong's supporters regard the price as too high and mostly a financial sop to the Bush administration, which has been pushing the sale since 2001. They also believe the weapons would not improve Taiwan's security. On December 27, 2004, mainland China issued its fifth Defense White Paper on the goals of the country's national defense efforts. As one long-time observer, Robert Bedeski, notes, "At first glance, the Defense White Paper is a hard-line statement on territorial sovereignty and emphasizes China's determination not to tolerate any moves at secession, independence, or separation. However, the next paragraph . . . indicates a willingness to reduce tensions in the Taiwan Strait: so long as the Taiwan authorities accept the one China principle and stop their separatist activities aimed at 'Taiwan independence,' cross-strait talks can be held at any time on officially ending the state of hostility between the two sides." It appears that this is also the way the Taiwanese read the message. On February 24, 2005, President Chen Shui-bian met for the first time since October 2000 with Chairman James Soong of the People First Party. The two leaders, holding diametrically opposed views on relations with the mainland, nonetheless signed a joint statement outlining ten points of consensus. They pledged to try to open full transport and commercial links across the Taiwan Strait, increase trade, and ease the ban on investments in China by many Taiwanese business sectors. The mainland reacted favorably at once. Astonishingly, this led Chen Shui-bian to say that he "would not rule out Taiwan's eventual reunion with China, provided Taiwan's 23 million people accepted it." If the United States and Japan left China and Taiwan to their own devices, it seems possible that they would work out a modus vivendi. Taiwan has already invested some $150 billion in the mainland, and the two economies are becoming more closely integrated every day. There also seems to be a growing recognition in Taiwan that it would be very difficult to live as an independent Chinese-speaking nation alongside a country with 1.3 billion people, 3.7 million square miles of territory, a rapidly growing $1.4 trillion economy, and aspirations to regional leadership in East Asia. Rather than declaring its independence, Taiwan may try to seek a status somewhat like that of French Canada -- a kind of looser version of a Chinese Quebec under nominal central government control but maintaining separate institutions, laws, and customs. The mainland would be so relieved by this solution it would probably accept it, particularly if it could be achieved before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China fears that Taiwanese radicals want to declare independence a month or two before those Olympics, betting that China would not attack then because of its huge investment in the forthcoming games. Most observers believe, however, that China would have no choice but to go to war because failure to do so would invite a domestic revolution against the Chinese Communist Party for violating the national integrity of China. Sino-American and Sino-Japanese Relations Spiral Downward It has long been an article of neo-con faith that the U.S. must do everything in its power to prevent the development of rival power centers, whether friendly or hostile. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this meant they turned their attention to China as one of our probable next enemies. In 2001, having come to power, the neo-conservatives shifted much of our nuclear targeting from Russia to China. They also began regular high-level military talks with Taiwan over defense of the island, ordered a shift of Army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region, and worked strenuously to promote the remilitarization of Japan. On April 1, 2001, a U.S. navy EP-3E Aries II electronic spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter off the south China coast. The American aircraft was on a mission to provoke Chinese radar defenses and then record the transmissions and procedures the Chinese used in sending up interceptors. The Chinese jet went down and the pilot lost his life, while the American plane landed safely on Hainan Island and its crew of twenty-four spies was well treated by the Chinese authorities. It soon became clear that China was not interested in a confrontation, since many of its most important investors have their headquarters in the United States. But it could not instantly return the crew of the spy plane without risking powerful domestic criticism for obsequiousness in the face of provocation. It therefore delayed eleven days until it received a pro forma American apology for causing the death of a Chinese pilot on the edge of the country's territorial air space and for making an unauthorized landing at a Chinese military airfield. Meanwhile, our media had labeled the crew as "hostages," encouraged their relatives to tie yellow ribbons around neighborhood trees, hailed the President for doing "a first-rate job" to free them, and endlessly criticized China for its "state-controlled media." They carefully avoided mentioning that the United States enforces around our country a 200-mile aircraft-intercept zone that stretches far beyond territorial waters. On April 25, 2001, during an interview on national television, President Bush was asked whether he would ever use "the full force of the American military" against China for the sake of Taiwan. He responded, "Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend herself." This was American policy until 9/11, when China enthusiastically joined the "war on terrorism" and the President and his neo-cons became preoccupied with their "axis of evil" and making war on Iraq. The United States and China were also enjoying extremely close economic relations, which the big- business wing of the Republican Party did not want to jeopardize. The Middle East thus trumped the neo-cons' Asia policy. While the Americans were distracted, China went about its economic business for almost four years, emerging as a powerhouse of Asia and a potential organizing node for Asian economies. Rapidly industrializing China also developed a voracious appetite for petroleum and other raw materials, which brought it into direct competition with the world's largest importers, the U.S. and Japan. By the summer of 2004, Bush strategists, distracted as they were by Iraq, again became alarmed over China's growing power and its potential to challenge American hegemony in East Asia. The Republican Party platform unveiled at its convention in New York in August proclaimed that "America will help Taiwan defend itself." During that summer, the Navy also carried out exercises it dubbed "Operation Summer Pulse '04," which involved the simultaneous deployment at sea of seven of our twelve carrier strike groups. An American carrier strike group includes an aircraft carrier (usually with 9 or 10 squadrons of planes, a total of about 85 aircraft in all), a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an attack submarine, and a combination ammunition-oiler-supply ship. Deploying seven such armadas at the same time was unprecedented -- and very expensive. Even though only three of the carrier strike groups were sent to the Pacific and no more than one was patrolling off Taiwan at a time, the Chinese became deeply alarmed that this marked the beginning of an attempted rerun of 19th century gunboat diplomacy aimed at them. This American show of force and Chen Shui-bian's polemics preceding the December elections also seemed to overstimulate the Taiwanese. On October 26 in Beijing, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to calm things down by declaring to the press, "Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy… We want to see both sides not take unilateral action that would prejudice an eventual outcome, a reunification that all parties are seeking." Powell's statement seemed unequivocal enough, but significant doubts persisted about whether he had much influence within the Bush administration or whether he could speak for Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Early in 2005, Porter Goss, the new director of the CIA, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Admiral Lowell Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, all told Congress that China's military modernization was going ahead much faster than previously believed. They warned that the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review, the every four-year formal assessment of U.S. military policy, would take a much harsher view of the threat posed by China than the 2001 overview. In this context, the Bush administration, perhaps influenced by the election of November 2 and the transition from Colin Powell's to Condi Rice's State Department, played its most dangerous card. On February 19, 2005 in Washington, it signed a new military agreement with Japan. For the first time, Japan joined the administration in identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a "common strategic objective." Nothing could have been more alarming to China's leaders than the revelation that Japan had decisively ended six decades of official pacifism by claiming a right to intervene in the Taiwan Strait. It is possible that, in the years to come, Taiwan itself may recede in importance to be replaced by even more direct Sino-Japanese confrontations. This would be an ominous development indeed, one that the United States would be responsible for having abetted but would certainly be unable to control. The kindling for a Sino-Japanese explosion has long been in place. After all, during World War II the Japanese killed approximately 23 million Chinese throughout East Asia -- higher casualties than the staggering ones suffered by Russia at the hands of the Nazis -- and yet Japan refuses to atone for or even acknowledge its historical war crimes. Quite the opposite, it continues to rewrite history, portraying itself as the liberator of Asia and a victim of European and American imperialism. In -- for the Chinese -- a painful act of symbolism, after becoming Japanese prime minister in 2001, Junichiro Koizumi made his first official visit to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a practice that he has repeated every year since. Koizumi likes to say to foreigners that he is merely honoring Japan's war dead. Yasukuni, however, is anything but a military cemetery or a war memorial. It was established in 1869 by Emperor Meiji as a Shinto shrine (though with its torii archways made of steel rather than the traditional red-painted wood) to commemorate the lives lost in campaigns to return direct imperial rule to Japan. During World War II, Japanese militarists took over the shrine and used it to promote patriotic and nationalistic sentiments. Today, Yasukuni is said to be dedicated to the spirits of approximately 2.4 million Japanese who have died in the country's wars, both civil and foreign, since 1853. In 1978, for reasons that have never been made clear, General Hideki Tojo and six other wartime leaders who had been hanged by the Allied Powers as war criminals were collectively enshrined at Yasukuni. The current chief priest of the shrine denies that they were war criminals, saying, "The winner passed judgment on the loser." In a museum on the shrine's grounds, there is a fully restored Mitsubishi Zero Type 52 fighter aircraft that a placard says made its combat debut in 1940 over Chongqing, then the wartime capital of the Republic of China. It was undoubtedly not an accident that, in Chongqing during the 2004 Asian Cup soccer finals, Chinese spectators booed the playing of the Japanese national anthem. Yasukuni's leaders have always claimed close ties to the imperial household, but the late Emperor Hirohito last visited the shrine in 1975 and Emperor Akihito has never been there. The Chinese regard Yasukuni visits by the Japanese prime minister as insulting, somewhat comparable perhaps to Britain's Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi for a costume party. Nonetheless, Beijing has tried in recent years to appease Tokyo. Chinese President Hu Jintao rolled out the red carpet for Yohei Kono, speaker of the Japanese Diet's House of Representatives, when he visited China in September 2004; he appointed Wang Yi, a senior moderate in the Chinese foreign service, as ambassador to Japan; and he proposed joint Sino-Japanese exploration of possible oil resources in the offshore seas that both sides claim. All such gestures were ignored by Koizumi who insists that he intends to go on visiting Yasukuni. Matters came to a head in November 2004 at two important summit meetings: an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in Santiago, Chile, followed immediately by an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting with the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea that took place in Vientiane, Laos. In Santiago, Hu Jintao directly asked Koizumi to cease his Yasukuni visits for the sake of Sino-Japanese friendship. Seemingly as a reply, Koizumi went out of his way to insult Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Vientiane. He said to Premier Wen, "It's about time for [China's] graduation [as a recipient of Japanese foreign aid payments]," implying that Japan intended unilaterally to end its 25-year-old financial aid program. The word "graduation" also conveyed the insulting implication that Japan saw itself as a teacher guiding China, the student. Koizumi next gave a little speech about the history of Japanese efforts to normalize relations with China, to which Premier Wen replied, "Do you know how many Chinese people died in the Sino-Japanese war?" Wen went on to suggest that China had always regarded Japan's foreign aid, which he said China did not need, as payments in lieu of compensation for damage done by Japan in China during the war. He pointed out that China had never asked for reparations from Japan and that Japan's payments amounted to about $30 billion over 25 years, a fraction of the $80 billion Germany has paid to the victims of Nazi atrocities even though Japan is the more populous and richer country. On November 10, 2004, the Japanese Navy discovered a Chinese nuclear submarine in Japanese territorial waters near Okinawa. Although the Chinese apologized and called the sub's intrusion a "mistake," Defense Agency Director Ono gave it wide publicity, further inflaming Japanese public opinion against China. From that point on, relations between Beijing and Tokyo have gone steadily downhill, culminating in the Japanese-American announcement that Taiwan was of special military concern to both of them, which China denounced as an "abomination." Over time this downward spiral in relations will probably prove damaging to the interests of both the United States and Japan, but particularly to those of Japan. China is unlikely to retaliate directly but is even less likely to forget what has happened -- and it has a great deal of leverage over Japan. After all, Japanese prosperity increasingly depends on its ties to China. The reverse is not true. Contrary to what one might expect, Japanese exports to China jumped 70% between 2001 and 2004, providing the main impetus for a sputtering Japanese economic recovery. Some 18,000 Japanese companies have operations in China. In 2003, Japan passed the United States as the top destination for Chinese students going abroad for a university education. Nearly 70,000 Chinese students now study at Japanese universities compared to 65,000 at American academic institutions. These close and lucrative relations are at risk if the U.S. and Japan pursue their militarization of the region. A Multipolar World Tony Karon of Time magazine has observed, "All over the world, new bonds of trade and strategic cooperation are being forged around the U.S. China has not only begun to displace the U.S. as the dominant player in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation organization (APEC), it is fast emerging as the major trading partner to some of Latin America's largest economies. . . . French foreign policy think tanks have long promoted the goal of 'multipolarity' in a post-Cold War world, i.e., the preference for many different, competing power centers rather than the 'unipolarity' of the U.S. as a single hyper-power. Multipolarity is no longer simply a strategic goal. It is an emerging reality." Evidence is easily found of multipolarity and China's prominent role in promoting it. Just note China's expanding relations with Iran, the European Union, Latin America, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Iran is the second largest OPEC oil producer after Saudi Arabia and has long had friendly relations with Japan, which is its leading trading partner. (Ninety-eight percent of Japan's imports from Iran are oil.) On February 18, 2004, a consortium of Japanese companies and the Iranian government signed a memorandum of agreement to develop jointly Iran's Azadegan oil field, one of the world's largest, in a project worth $2.8 billion. The U.S. has opposed Japan's support for Iran, causing Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) to charge that Bush had been bribed into accepting the Japanese-Iranian deal by Koizumi's dispatch of 550 Japanese troops to Iraq, adding a veneer of international support for the American war there. But the long-standing Iranian-Japanese alignment began to change in late 2004. On October 28, China's oil major, the Sinopec Group, signed an agreement with Iran worth between $70 and $100 billion to develop the giant Yadavaran natural gas field. China agreed to buy 250 million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Iran over 25 years. It is the largest deal Iran has signed with a foreign country since 1996 and will include several other benefits, including China's assistance in building numerous ships to deliver the LNG to Chinese ports. Iran also committed itself to exporting 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day to China for 25 years at market prices. Iran's oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, on a visit to Beijing noted that Iran is China's biggest foreign oil supplier and said that his country wants to be China's long-term business partner. He told China Business Weekly that Tehran would like to replace Japan with China as the biggest customer for its oil and gas. The reason is obvious: American pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear power development program and the Bush administration's declared intention to take Iran to the U.N. Security Council for the imposition of sanctions (which a Chinese vote could veto). On November 6, 2004, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing paid a rare visit to Tehran. In meetings with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, Li said that Beijing would indeed consider vetoing any American effort to sanction Iran at the Security Council. The U.S. has also charged China with selling nuclear and missile technology to Iran. China and Iran already did a record $4 billion worth of two-way business in 2003. Projects included China's building of the first stage of Tehran's Metro and a contract to build a second link worth $836 million. China will be the top contender to build four other planned lines, including a 19 mile track to the airport. In February 2003, Chery Automobile Company, the eighth largest automaker in China, opened its first overseas production plant in Iran. Today, it manufactures 30,000 Chery cars annually in northeastern Iran. Beijing is also negotiating to construct a 240 mile pipeline from Iran to the northern Caspian Sea to connect with the long-distance Kazakhstan to Xinjiang pipeline that it began building in October 2004. The Kazakh pipeline has a capacity to deliver 10 million tons of oil to China per year. Despite American bluster and belligerence, Iran is anything but isolated in today's world. The EU is China's largest trading partner and China is the EU's second largest trading partner (after the United States). Back in 1989, to protest the suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the EU imposed a ban on military sales to China. The only other countries so treated are true international pariahs like Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Even North Korea is not subject to a formal European arms embargo. Given that the Chinese leadership has changed several times since 1989 and as a gesture of goodwill, the EU has announced its intention to lift the embargo. Jacques Chirac, the French president, is one of the strongest proponents of the idea of replacing American hegemony with a "multipolar world." On a visit to Beijing in October 2004, he said that China and France share "a common vision of the world" and that lifting the embargo will "mark a significant milestone: a moment when Europe had to make a choice between the strategic interests of America and China -- and chose China." In his trip to Western Europe in February 2005, Bush repeatedly said, "There is deep concern in our country that a transfer of weapons would be a transfer of technology to China, which would change the balance of relations between China and Taiwan." In early February, the House of Representatives voted 411 to 3 in favor of a resolution condemning the potential EU move. The Europeans and Chinese contend that the Bush administration has vastly overstated its case, that no weapons capable of changing the balance of power are involved, and that the EU is not aiming to win massive new defense contracts from China but to strengthen mutual economic relations in general. Immediately following Bush's tour of Europe, the EU Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, arrived in Beijing for his first official visit. The purpose of his trip, he said, was to stress the need to create a new strategic partnership between China and Europe. Washington has buttressed its hard-line stance with the release of many new intelligence estimates depicting China as a formidable military threat. Whether this intelligence is politicized or not, it argues that China's military modernization is aimed precisely at countering the Navy's carrier strike groups, which would assumedly be used in the Taiwan Strait in case of war. China is certainly building a large fleet of nuclear submarines and is an active participant in the EU's Galileo Project to produce a satellite navigation system not controlled by the American military. The Defense Department worries that Beijing might adapt the Galileo technology to anti-satellite purposes. American military analysts are also impressed by China's launch, on October 15, 2003, of a spacecraft containing a single astronaut who was successfully returned to Earth the following day. Only the former USSR and the United States had previously sent humans into outer space. China already has 500 to 550 short-range ballistic missiles deployed opposite Taiwan and has 24 CSS-4 ICBMs with a range of 13,000 km to deter an American missile attack on the Chinese mainland. According to Richard Fisher, a researcher at the U.S.-based Center for Security Policy, "The forces that China is putting in place right now will probably be more than sufficient to deal with a single American aircraft carrier battle group." Arthur Lauder, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, concurs. He says that the Chinese military "is the only one being developed anywhere in the world today that is specifically configured to fight the United States of America." The U.S. obviously cannot wish away this capability, but it has no evidence that China is doing anything more than countering the threats coming from the Bush administration. It seeks to avoid war with Taiwan and the U.S. by deterring them from separating Taiwan from China. For this reason, in March 2005, China's pro-forma legislature, the National People's Congress, passed a law making secession from China illegal and authorizing the use of force in case a territory tried to leave the country. The Japanese government, of course, backs the American position that China constitutes a military threat to the entire region. Interestingly enough, however, the Australian government of John Howard, a loyal American ally when it comes to Iraq, has decided to defy Bush on the issue of lifting the European arms embargo. Australia places a high premium on good relations with China and is hoping to negotiate a free trade agreement between the two countries. Canberra has therefore decided to support the EU in lifting the 15-year-old embargo. Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder both say, "It will happen." The United States has long proclaimed that Latin America is part of its "sphere of influence," and because of that most foreign countries have tread carefully in doing business there. However, in the search for fuel and minerals for its booming economy, China is openly courting many Latin American countries regardless of what Washington thinks. On November 15, 2004, President Hu Jintao ended a five day visit to Brazil during which he signed more than a dozen accords aimed at expanding Brazil's sales to China and Chinese investment in Brazil. Under one agreement Brazil will export to China as much as $800 million annually in beef and poultry. In turn, China agreed with Brazil's state-controlled oil company to finance a $1.3 billion gas pipeline between Rio de Janeiro and Bahia once technical studies are completed. China and Brazil also entered into a "strategic partnership" with the objective of raising the value of bilateral trade from $10 billion in 2004 to $20 billion by 2007. President Hu said that this partnership symbolized "a new international political order that favored developing countries." In the weeks that followed, China signed important investment and trade agreements with Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and Cuba. Of particular interest, in December 2004, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela visited China and agreed to give it wide-ranging access to his country's oil reserves. Venezuela is the world's fifth largest oil exporter and normally sells about 60% of its output to the United States, but under the new agreements China will be allowed to operate 15 mature oil fields in eastern Venezuela. China will invest around $350 million to extract oil and another $60 million in natural gas wells. China is also working to integrate East Asia's smaller countries into some form of new economic and political community. Such an alignment, if it comes into being, will certainly erode American and Japanese influence in the area. In November 2004, the ten nations that make up ASEAN or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), met in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, joined by the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea. The United States was not invited and the Japanese officials seemed uncomfortable being there. The purpose was to plan for an East Asian summit meeting to be held in November 2005 to begin creating an "East Asia Community." In December 2004, the ASEAN countries and China also agreed to create a free-trade zone among themselves by 2010. According to Edward Cody of the Washington Post, "Trade between China and the 10 ASEAN countries has increased about 20% a year since 1990, and the pace has picked up in the last several years." This trade hit $78.2 billion in 2003 and was reported to be about $100 billion by the end of 2004. As the senior Japanese political commentator Yoichi Funabashi observes, "The ratio of intra-regional trade [in East Asia] to worldwide trade was nearly 52% in 2002. Though this figure is lower than the 62% in the EU, it tops the 46% of NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. East Asia is thus becoming less dependent on the U.S. in terms of trade." China is the primary moving force behind these efforts. According to Funabashi China's leadership plans to use the country's explosive economic growth and its ever more powerful links to regional trading partners to marginalize the United States and isolate Japan in East Asia. He argues that the United States underestimated how deeply distrusted it had become in the region thanks to its narrow-minded and ideological response to the East Asian financial crisis of 1997, which it largely caused. On November 30, 2004, Michael Reiss, the director of policy planning in the State Department, said in Tokyo, "The U.S., as a power in the Western Pacific, has an interest in East Asia. We would be unhappy about any plans to exclude the U.S. from the framework of dialogue and cooperation in this region." But it is probably already too late for the Bush administration to do much more than delay the arrival of a China-dominated East Asian community, particularly because of declining American economic and financial strength. For Japan, the choices are more difficult still. Sino-Japanese enmity has had a long history in East Asia, always with disastrous outcomes. Before World War II, one of Japan's most influential writers on Chinese affairs, Hotsumi Ozaki, prophetically warned that Japan, by refusing to adjust to the Chinese revolution and instead making war on it, would only radicalize the Chinese people and contribute to the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party. He spent his life working on the question "Why should the success of the Chinese revolution be to Japan's disadvantage?" In 1944, the Japanese government hanged Ozaki as a traitor, but his question remains as relevant today as it was in the late 1930s. Why should China's emergence as a rich, successful country be to the disadvantage of either Japan or the United States? History teaches us that the least intelligent response to this development would be to try to stop it through military force. As a Hong Kong wisecrack has it, China has just had a couple of bad centuries and now it's back. The world needs to adjust peacefully to its legitimate claims -- one of which is for other nations to stop militarizing the Taiwan problem -- while checking unreasonable Chinese efforts to impose its will on the region. Unfortunately, the trend of events in East Asia suggests we may yet see a repetition of the last Sino-Japanese conflict, only this time the U.S. is unlikely to be on the winning side. ____________ Source citations and other references for this Tomgram are available on the web site of the Japan Policy Research Institute. Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. The first two books in his Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic -- are now available in paperback. The third volume is being written.

US Want Full Access to Bulgarian Military Bases Sofia News Agency 14 March 2006 ...major disagreements arise around the conditions of access to the bases. While Bulgaria wants guarantees that these facilities would not be used without its consent, the US demand full access. They also want to apply their own jurisdiction and laws when an American violates the law on Bulgarian territory. Bulgarians do not agree on that point and this has stalled the negotiations for a while, the MP added. The United States demand that Bulgaria grants them unlimited access to Bulgaria's military bases and equipment, and Bulgaria does not agree. Negotiations concerning US military bases here still haven't been concluded, Angel Naydenov, head of the Parliamentary Defence Committee explained for private Nova television. Three negotiation stages have been so far completed since October 2005, and Bulgaria is currently very close to the finish, he said. However, major disagreements arise around the conditions of access to the bases. While Bulgaria wants guarantees that these facilities would not be used without its consent, the US demand full access. They also want to apply their own jurisdiction and laws when an American violates the law on Bulgarian territory. Bulgarians do not agree on that point and this has stalled the negotiations for a while, the MP added. Should both sides reach an agreement, the US would pay for the use and maintenance of the facilities and invest in military infrastructure, but all bases will be under a Bulgarian flag. There is no guarantee that such an agreement would be reached at all, Naydenov warned, and added that no specific deadlines have been set for concluding the negotiations. There is a bog difference between Bulgaria and Romania's negotiations with the US, Naydenov said. While Romania has met all the demands put forth by the Americans, Bulgaria is trying to protect its national interests. The US has asked to be given access to a third military base in central Bulgaria, though negotiations have been so far focused on two sites alone - Bezmer airfield and Novo Selo shooting range. An airfield at Graf Ignatievo, near the second largest Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, is said to match all of the Pentagon's requirements.